I'm trying to upgrade my mother-in-law's Dell laptop by cloning her HDD to an SSD. I did the cloning on my desktop, and everything seemed fine at first since I got the BitLocker encryption message on both drives. However, now the laptop won't boot from either the SSD or the original HDD. I attempted a fresh Windows installation from a flash drive, but I can still see all the partitions on the SSD. I'm feeling confused and overwhelmed, as the process hasn't gone as smoothly as the YouTube tutorials suggested. Any advice would be really appreciated!
1 Answer
When cloning the HDD with BitLocker enabled, the encryption got copied over, which is why neither drive is booting now. Here's how to fix it:
1. Put the old HDD back in the laptop and decrypt it first, so you can get rid of the encryption.
2. Once that's done, you can re-clone it to the SSD using software like Macrium Reflect.
3. If you want an easier route, just do a clean Windows install on the SSD first, and then connect the old HDD with a USB/SATA adapter to copy over the files you need.
4. If you're keen on saving your current clone, boot up from a Windows install USB and use Startup Repair or the bootrec /rebuildbcd command to fix the bootloader.
Can you elaborate on option 4 a bit? I tried the fresh install, but it's only allowing me to select partitions without formatting the whole drive.