I am attempting to upgrade my boot drive from a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD  to a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB NVME drive. (Edited names to reflect actual devices.)

I am using the Macrium Reflect software and mount the unitialized 970 EVO on my computer. I select "Clone this disk:" from the original drive and move the  C: boot drive, NTFS partition, and the D: APPs drive to the new drive. I adjust the partition sizes to take advantage of the new space. (See the attached JPG of my Reflect session.)

When I move the new drive to the mother board in the old one's place, and I reboot, Windows 10 halts and give the message "unrecognized boot drive".

Did I mess up the process? Is there a way to debug or fix this issue? Any help to get this new drive bootable is appreciated.
Thanks!

I almost missed this since you wrote you were moving from a 950 to a 970, but your screenshot reveals that you are actually moving from an 850 to a 970.  The 950 is an NVMe SSD like your new 970, but the 850 is a SATA SSD.  Cloning from a SATA to NVMe SSD as you are doing typically requires running Macrium ReDeploy so that it can reconfigure Windows to load an NVMe driver at startup instead of a SATA driver, otherwise Windows literally won't be able to see the disk it's trying to boot from.  (The exception is systems that have a RAID or RAID-like controller enabled such as Intel Rapid Storage, in which case that controller abstracts the true storage interface from the OS.)  So while your 970 Evo is installed internally, boot your system from Reflect Rescue Media, then run ReDeploy.  If it still doesn't work, boot into that again and run Fix Boot Problems.  Also make sure you get the latest release of Reflect before you create your Rescue Media, since Macrium just recently included an enhancement to ReDeploy.

Thanks, jphughan for your quick reply. You did catch that the origin drive was an 850 EVO.

I attempted to follow your recommendation, but I ran into problems. Perhaps I am not understanding the process.

1) I updated Reflect to the 4952 build.
2) I created a Reflect Rescue Media on a spare USB and rebooted to that.
3) I did not understand if I am running ReDeploy onto the old 850 drive or the new 970 drive. Should only one be in the system or both? I picked the newer drive, but it does not find driver directories. I add the Samsung 970 EVO I:\WINDOWS directory to the list. It appears to find a Standard SATA AHCI Controller driver, but then it continues to search and has a core dump. It cannot write the core dump info to the spare USB drive, but there is a redeploy.log on the 970 drive.

Thanks.

It might be easier to disconnect the 850 at least for now, especially if you end up having to run Fix Boot Problems.  Once you get your system booting from the new drive, you can always reconnect the other one and wipe it (or whatever you want to do with it).  If you run ReDeploy against the Windows installation on your 970, it should find the NVMe driver built into Windows and use that.  What version of Windows are you ReDeploying?  If you're on Windows 7, it doesn't have native support for NVMe (that arrived in Win8), so that would be the problem.  And unfortunately Samsung doesn't provide their NVMe driver in "INF format" in order to supply it easily.  But since you can have both disks connected simultaneously, I might be able to suggest a way to address this if Windows 7 is indeed the issue here.

+x

 

jphughan - 5 June 2020 5:17 PM

It might be easier to disconnect the 850 at least for now, especially if you end up having to run Fix Boot Problems.

You have gotten me out of the weeds. I moved the new drive to the motherboard where is became drive C:. My confusion is that the Restore process asked me where to find drivers. I pointed it to C:\WINDOWS, and it would have a coredump. When I pointed it to the boot drive X:, it found the drivers and was able to complete.

This is on Windows 10.0.18363.

Thanks for your help. Your quick support times were very helpful!

Ah ok. In my first post I said, “While your 970 Evo is installed internally,” meaning not connected through an adapter, because when it’s connected through an adapter, ReDeploy has no way to know that it’s an NVMe SSD, since it appears as USB storage, and therefore it won’t think it needs to do anything about NVMe support.

The X drive is a virtual RAM disk containing the Windows PE/RE environment that Reflect Rescue is running on, plus Reflect itself, but if you’re using a WinPE/RE kernel that has native NVMe support then you’d be able to get a driver from that source as well. No idea why you had a coredump searching C though. Anyhow, glad you’re sorted!