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In order to get a little more boost out of an oldish laptop, I want to swap the internal HDD out with an SSD. The laptop is: Acer Aspire E 14 Touch (E5-471P-32VS).

I started by backing it all up, and upgrading from the original 8.1 to Windows 10, this was fine, and completed smoothly.

Now I want to change the HDD out. It came with a Western Digital (Blue) 1TB (WD10JPVX), so I cloned the disk (with dd on another pc), and simply put it back in. The replacement SSD is a Western Digital (Blue) 1TB (WDS100T2B0A). This seems like a close as possible dropin replacement.... right? wrong!

It's been a few days now, and while the laptop still boots fine with the original disk, the SSD simply don't boot at all. I have been to hundreds of sites, all claiming to be able to simply clone the disk and put it back in, an off you go. There is something substantial missing to all this.

I have tried all the windows repair stuff at the startup. Nothing works, it just says it can't repair it.

I tried:

bootrec /fixmbr

bootrec /fixboot (it gives access denied error)

bootsect /nt60 sys

bootrec /scanos. (It finds the windows and the windows.old (probably the old 8.1))

bootrec /rebuildbcd (but when i try this, it sees the installation, but, it says it cannot find the path specified, after it just showed me c:\windows)

What was very interesting is that I even tried to do a fresh install from the bootable USB, but each time I tried I got an error during the copy phase of the installation. Something about corrupt source files. Don't worry, I tried different flash drives, and 3 different methods of making the flash disk... it was not the flash drive! It was also not the SSD... I bought two, both had the same issue, at various points during the copy phase. (I was able to delete the existing partitions to make the entire disk unused space, and then partition them again during the install.)

I have a hunch, its something to do with some sort of secure booting options, that are supposed to be making it "better" and "safer", but are just making it annoying right now.

Does anyone have the solution for this?

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  • Just to be sure: can you share your dd command?
    – Halfgaar
    Nov 7, 2022 at 7:26
  • No parameters, dd if=disk3 of=/disk4. But I also used Macrium Reflect (while the system was loaded) to clone the disk, with the same results.
    – Conrad
    Nov 7, 2022 at 7:39
  • I found this pose about secure boot: community.acer.com/en/discussion/569360/… and tried to disable Secure Boot, it does the same thing at startup: "A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed. Error code: 0xc0000225"
    – Conrad
    Nov 7, 2022 at 7:41
  • As a side note: the format on the Stack Exchange website is to edit your question with the requested info, to make it one coherent story. Hence the smallness of the comment box. The other note: your dd comment can use a bs=4M (for example). That's the block size, and will make it much faster.
    – Halfgaar
    Nov 7, 2022 at 11:22

1 Answer 1

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In case anyone else is coming up with the same issue. I fixed it with the following:

  1. Boot your computer from the Windows installation media.
  2. Press Next at Language options screen.
  3. Choose Repair your computer.
  4. Then choose Troubleshoot -> Advanced Options –> Command Prompt.
  5. In command prompt give the following command and press Enter:

diskpart

  1. Then type list volume and press Enter.

What you may find here is the disk called ESP has no drive letter. Also make sure that the windows partition is assigned a letter C

Give the ESP a drive letter:

select volume 3 (or 4 or whatever the ESP volume number is)

assign letter=Z

exit this menu with exit

Now enter this command: bcdboot C:\windows /s Z: /f UEFI

Then reboot

https://www.repairwin.com/fix-your-pc-needs-to-be-repaired-error-0xc0000225/

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