Cannot boot after migrating my Windows 8.1 installation to a new drive

Question

I want to migrate my Thinkpad X1 Carbon (2015)'s Windows 8.1 installation to a new 240GB PCIe 2.0 4x SSD. I figured that Clonezilla may work for that but cannot boot now.

1. Turned off SecureBoot because it wasn't letting me boot into Clonezilla Live USB.
2. Booted into Clonezilla.
3. Created an image of the original drive and saved it to USB drive.
4. Shutdown.
5. Swapped the drive on my Thinkpad to the new 240GB drive.
6. Booted into Clonezilla.
7. Imaged the new drive with the image in the USB drive.

However, now I am unable to boot into Windows. First, I get this message in the UEFI boot screen: First, I see this error on the UEFI screen:

error SataControllerSupported OpenProtocol gEfiDevicePathProtocolGuid status F

Then, It goes into some sort of "safe mode" saying it can't boot.

Some things I've tried:

• Re-enabled SecureBoot, still same issue. Any thing else I should do on that end?

• Tried going into advance mode's command prompt and running bootrec with /fixboot and then /rebuildbcd. The former said it was successful and the latter said it did not detect a Windows installation. Rebooted, still same issue.

• Put the original drive in and it worked without any issues.

Any other troubleshooting steps I should take? Or possible solution?

Note: I cannot connect both drives at the same time because I only have one M.2 connector so that limits the type of troubleshooting I could do.

Answer 1

After my initial bootrec.exe attempt didn't detect any Windows installation, I dug further into Microsoft's documentation.

I booted into RE again and went to the command line to load diskpart:

> diskpart

Selected the disk:

DISKPART> list disk
DISKPART> select disk 0

Selected the partition called "SYSTEM_DRV" (FAT32 filesystem) and assigned it a letter:

DISKPART> list volume
DISKPART> select volume 2
DISKPART> assign letter=f
DISKPART> exit

Navigated to the Microsoft BCD directory:

C:> F:
C:> cd EFI\Microsoft\Boot

Backed up my current BCD:

F:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot> bcdedit /export C:\bcd.backup
F:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot> ren BCD BCD.backup

And, finally, rebuilt it:

F:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot> bootrec /RebuildBcd
F:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot> exit

After rebooting, everything worked fine.

I'm surprised that I cannot find much on this problem so it may be something unique to my setup. Nevertheless, hope this helps someone else.