Greeting friends. In a pickle at work and need help. Here’s the skinny. There’s an HP Elite Desk that is used as an application server for a couple machines at a branch. The higher ups would like to replicate this setup. For reasons I won’t go into (cough, money, cough), we are unable to have the software supplier setup the new machine from scratch. So they had me make a clone of the drive and place it into another machine, but I’m getting a 3F0 error, BootDrive Not Found.
Additional info: The setup uses a proprietary dongle that we have to buy for each installation, which we have waiting, and a monthly service fee. This system, or ones like it, are mandated by the gov (Zim) and the fees can be ridiculous be cause the companies all have ties to it.
So the question is why am I not picking up the boot device, especially if it boots when I place it in the first machine?
TL;DR No boot device found when a cloned drive is placed into a new machine, even though clone works on original.
try running a checksum against the source block device, and the cloned block device. maybe a sector or two got corrupted?
edit: oh well that won’t help narrow down the issue if the cloned disk works in the original
Try to do an exact clone (no auto-resized partitions to fit the disk). If you can boot the cloned drive, use either Windows Disk Manager or MiniTool Partition Wizard to move/resize partitions.
is likely the problem and the dongle probably contains the key so the drive can be read by that system.
so unless you have a matching key you likely wont be able to read the drive.
only way to know is to pull the dongle and use it with the new system… if it works then you will likely have to buy another dongle… even then it may not work with the drive you cloned. as the new dongle key will likely need its create its own keypair.
so it can encrypt the disk with its own keys.
I have but it doesn’t detect the boot files on the SSD. In the terminal bootrec detects a Windows install on the SSD, but even going through that route doesn’t yield any results.
Have tried with both Macrium and DriveClone, both with no luck. Thinking of Clonezilla next, just in case the cloning method is the problem. My gut says UEFI setting is where to look, but I’m smart enough to know that I’m out of my depth here.
@anon7678104 Would that really affect booting? I’d have thought that until bootstrap nothing is loaded except for kernal and system resources. Sorry if it’s dumb question, just trying to learn from people that know more than me.
That sounds promising if it’s detecting the Windows install in WinRE. Would you mind post the output of the two commands below? Maybe someone here will see a glaring issue with the boot settings.
So the bcedit command won’t run from the bootable thumb-drive, and the list of disks volumes is shown. I also put in the results from the bootrec /ScanOS command.
So the disk doesn’t contain a FAT32 EFI partition which is required for UEFI boot. If the partition layout is the same on the original disk then Windows is running in a legacy BIOS boot mode. So your options will be to find a compatible option in BIOS setup or do the quite complicated task of manually resizing/moving partitions, creating a EFI partition, and rebuilding the BCD… which is not for the faint of heart.
yes it can affect booting.
on the original build there is likely options such as secure boot set up and running.
the key on the dongle will likely be read by the secure boot which then enables reading of the drive.
but the drive has to be found first and 3f0 says the drive isnt being detected.
so to fix this go into bios/uefi and enable legacy disk support.
this will allow the system to see both gpt/mbr as bootable options.
while in eufi check for tpm and smart boot options and enable them if they are enabled on the original system.
plug in the dongle.
and reboot…
you should go back to eufi/bios and check the drive has shown up in the drive boot order list.
if it does. select it as the primary boot device.
save and quit.
with luck you should be able to boot.
if it does you should now be able to share the dongle between each machine.
with the understanding that the other will be out of commission when there is no dongle present.
Hey, sorry for the late reply. So the mbr2gpt.exe tool was exactly what was needed. Had to run it from a bootable flash with WinPE installed but everything is up and running now. Thanks for everyone who took a look and wasted precious compute cycles on this. Looking at you two @anon7678104@Four0Four
