Not booting after cloning HD a SSD drive, Recovery CD not working...

Hey,

Having a problem with my laptop not booting after cloning to an SSD drive. I have been googling for a possible fix, but nothing has worked so far, so I thought I would sign up here and see if anyone has experienced similar issues and if there is a possible fix.

I am running a custom built laptop for music production, but my harddrive failed, the recovery partition was lost as well as almost all the data on the drive. The solution was to buy a new SSD and clone the HDD of my friend's identical laptop (everything is identical, OS, hardware etc.) The idea was to clone the drive of my friends computer, install it in mine and do a factory reset via the recovery partition.

After cloning the hdd to my new SSD drive my computer won´t boot.

When trying to boot to the cloned SSD I get the message:
"Reboot and Select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key"

When following the boot order from BIOS I get the message:
"PXE-E61 Media test failure, check cable"
(looks like it has something to do with the ethernet controller, however this is the last item in the boot list).

When trying to boot into Hiren's Boot (USB) the same error message shows up:
"reboot and select proper boot device...".

Now it is possible to boot into the startup repair cd I created and the windows 7 install disc, however, after selecting input language it tells me:
"This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair. Try using a recovery disc that is compatible with this version of windows".

BIOS is recognizing the harddrive, and the name of it is shown in the list, so it is connected properly.
I have tried changing the boot order according to guides explaining how to fix this problem but it does not work.

I am kind of stuck on this now. The cloning process seems to be successfull since I checked before I put the SSD in my laptop (all folders and files etc. was there.).

A fresh install of windows would mean loosing the revocery partition and the ability to do a factory reset, and loosing all the optimizations made to the OS.

If anyone has any ideas on how to fix this I would greatly appreciate it!

Using windows 7 professional 64bit, the new ssd drive is a Samsung Evo 850.

Hi and welcome to the Forum.
Are you absolutely certain that both laptops had the same version of Windows?
Have you seen this:
PXE-E61 Media Test Failure Error

I dited my post and it seems we crossed. Can you go back to my post and see the extra line I put in?
This prompted my reply:
"This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair.

This is getting a bit beyond me now so I would only be guessing and maybe do more harm than good. If you are going to clone the disc again the only confident thing I could suggest is to use Macrium Reflect software.

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do and how but I would like to point out a few things.

1. Use Macrium Reflect is my suggestion also.

2. Clones of operating systems should/must be made from the same computer and only used if needed to that computer.
Otherwise a operating system clone made from computer "A" will not work properly on computer "B" even if it ever booted.

I use clones often but they are only used on the same computer they were created from.