Solved Migrating Windows 7 to a larger SSD (EFI)

[Dr Freeman]

Right now I've got Win7 installed in a 240 GB SSD. I thought it would be a walk in the park to just clone the drive to the newer (480 GB) one with CloneZilla... but when the cloning was over and tried booting the new SSD I was greeted with an error from Windows Boot Manager:


So at this point I'm just mad at the whole thing and wish I never have to do anything with a computer again but first I though it would be wise to ask you guys for help.



File: \windows\system32\boot\winload.efi

Status: 0xc0000225 Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt

I've read more on this issue and found out this is a common issue when cloning an EFI Windows installation.
I tried using System Repair to repair the BCD so that the cloned installation could boot but I got the
"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."

Then I went on and tried to mess around with EasyBCD and the new SSD's boot partition but no luck.
So lastly, I tried making an image of my old Windows install with the Backup and Recover tool that comes with Windows so that I could restore it in a new installation.
But the thing also gives me an error when running it (Error code 0x80070057; "the parameter is incorrect")


So at this point I'm just mad at the whole thing and wish I never have to do anything with a computer again but first I though it would be wise to ask you guys for help.

 

[SIW2]

I tried using System Repair to repair the BCD so that the cloned installation could boot but I got the
"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."

You need to boot the system repair disc in efi mode.

 

[Dr Freeman]

You need to boot the system repair disc in efi mode.

I tried doing that but the thing just wouldn't load. So instead I cloned the SSD again, made a Win10 Installation USB (which booted correctly under UEFI) and used the Command prompt from it.


I ran the following commands:

[B][I]bootrec /fixboot[/I][/B]  [B][I]bootrec /scanos[/I][/B]  [B][I]bootrec /fixmbr[/I][/B]  [B][I]bootrec /rebuildbcd[/I][/B]

And after mounting the new SSD alone, I also ran:

 [B]bcdboot c:\Windows /s w: /f uefi[/B]

for good measure.


And it worked! But when I booted into Windows, I noticed the C: drive was missing the Windows icon over it. Fearing that it would lead to other issues I ran
sfc /scannow

as found on a post at Microsoft Answers, and it fixed that.

​

Thanks for your help!

 

[SIW2]

If you created the system repair disc using recdisc built into win7, that doesn't support efi.

For future use, you can borrow my fancy win7 repair media.17514x64v26.iso

Best to extract the iso to usb using this View attachment Usb7ice.zip or similar

 

[file3456]

Did you use the device-device option in Clonezilla?

You'll wanna use the expert settings and what's shown here except reinstall Grub, automatically adjust file system geometry, and resize the file system. You'll want to chose force to use sector by sector, and I'm not sure, but you may or may not need to check the option for skip updating boot entries in EFI NVRAM. This is what I do for my drives, except they're encrypted and NTFS. Clonezilla can clone encrypted drives so it's why I use it.

You may want to have a look here Scroll to the bottom and see the images. I guess if it works in 10 for UEFI, it should work in 7 for UEFI as well. Though, to me a sector by sector seems prudent when it involves an EFI partition of the disk.