No bootable device Acer Aspire TC-885

Alkay2020

Assistance for Acer Aspire TC-885

I am trying to upgrade to a new Acer Aspire TC-885.
The old hard drive is from an Acer system and I would like to keep all installed programs and files as they are on the new system by doing a system clone of
the old 1 TB sata hard drive to the new 120GB SSD. The data on the old 1TB Seagate HDD has approximately 80Gb of used data so this should fit on the SSD.

Using the OS on the brand new Acer Aspire TC-885 factory image on the SSD I tried the "clone" not "system clone" option from the 1TB Seagate hard drive to
the SSD using EaseUS Todo Backup and the new system rebooted into WinPE and then
an error was displayed. I cannot replicate the error because I have no OS to boot anymore but I believe it was the following or similar posted on another
forum:
EaseUS: failed to write sector 0x1760e077

There was no option in the WinPE GUI to reboot the PC so I hard powered the system off and on.
I then received an error after POST displaying No bootable device.

I now cannot see the SSD in the BIOS and receive the same boot error when attempting to boot from USB when changing the boot order in the BIOS.

How do I boot off an external usb 3.0 flash drive?

Both systems were running Windows 10.

I would really appreciate some help because I cannot find any detailed instructions on Acer's website on how to achieve the above.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Edited the thread to hide sensitive information.
Acer-Samuel.

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Alkay2020

Here is an update. I hope someone can assist me please. The error after POST is the following:

Reboot and Select proper Boot Device
or Insert Boot Media in selected device and press a key

billsey

Yeah, the SSD has had it's partition table wiped and not yet replaced. Does the cloning software you are using have a bootable image that you could use to retry the clone? You need to clone all the partitions on the HDD to the SSD and only allow the cloning software to resize the C: partition. If it tries to resize the hidden system partitions it'll leave things non-bootable again. Worse case at this point is likely to boot on the HDD, install all the missing drivers because the drive wasn't setup for the new computer, then once it's running and stable redo the clone process to the SSD. Once that is complete you disconnect the HDD again and boot using just the SSD. It should come up and be fine. When you are convinced the SSD is stable, put the HDD back in and wipe the excess partitions off it.

Alkay2020

Billsey,
Thank you for the helpful reply. I was using EaseUS Todo Backup when I received the above error in the usb bootable WinPE environment. I don't know if it had the ability to automatically shrink the old hard drive C:\ partition to the new SSD. I'm happy to try any cloning software to get this done.
I have just read that EaseUS also have a free version of EaseUS Partition Master that sounds like it might do what you are suggesting above about resizing the C:\ drive of the source partition?

Thank you,

Edited the content to hide personal information
Acer-Samuel

Alkay2020

Ok so I followed the suggestions from Billsey by doing the following.

Resized the C: drive(Windows 10, MBR) partition on the old 1 TB HDD down to 70GB so it fits on the 120GB SSD.
Resized the D drive NTFS (About 400GB with 3.5GB actually used) partition on the old 1 TB HDD down to 4GB so it fits on the 120GB SSD.
Cloned all of the other system partitions on the old hard drive keeping the original sizes for the destination SSD. The SSD says it's a GPT.
Turned off PC.
Unplugged the old HDD, Leaving only the SSD connected.
Turned on PC.
Received the same error again as above:
Reboot and Select proper Boot Device
or Insert Boot Media in selected device and press a key

I cannot see the SSD anywhere in the BIOS.

Here is some more information in the BIOS if this helps troubleshoot the issue.

BIOS Setup Utility Version 2.20.1271

Authentication tab displays the following settings:
System Boot State: User
Secure Boot Mode State: Enabled
Secure Boot: Enabled
Secure Boot Mode: Standard
Default Key Provisioning: Enabled

Security tab displays the following settings:
Supervisor Password: Not Installed
User Password: Not Installed
Change Supervisor Password: [Press Enter]
TPM Device Selection: [PTT]
TPM Support: [Enabled]
TPM Operation: [None]
SHA-1 PCR Bank: [Enabled]
SHA256 PCR Bank: [Enabled]

After booting off the USB Flash drive in the WinPE environment the SSD is visible as (Disk 0 119.24GB, Basic GPT).

I would appreciate any help so I get get this system to boot.

Thank you,

Edited the content to hide personal information
Acer-Samuel

Alkay2020

As a test I have created a bootable USB with the Windows Media Creation Tool and successfully installed Windows 10 on the SSD but I still have the same issue getting the old data cloned from the HDD to the SSD and making it bootable(see above POST error).

As stated above I have resized the partitions on the source 1TB old HDD so it should fit on the 120GB SSD as helpfully suggested by Billsey.

Does the 1TB old HDD need to be converted to GPT first before cloning to the SSD?

Thank you,

A.

billsey

Let's boot to the install flash drive and use the Repair option to get a command prompt. From there fire up diskpart and take a look at whether the SSD is in GPT mode and what sizes of partitions are actually there.

Alkay2020

Hi Billsey,

Thank you for the reply.

I still have the same POST error with the SSD after doing another test clone.

Please note the old 1TB HDD has a MBR partition.

I cannot see an option to change the Acer BIOS to Legacy BIOS so the system will boot if that helps. I haven't tried to plug the old sata hard drive into the new computer to see if it boots. It apparently has windows 10 on it from an older acer computer. The new SSD is in the new acer computer.

I booted from the flash drive and ran diskpart and then list disk which displays the following:

Disk###: Disk 0
Status: Online
Size: 119 GB
Free: 10 GB
GPT: *

Then I ran select disk 0 and then list partition which displays the following:

Partition ###: Partition 1
Type: Primary
Size: 13GB
Offset: 1024 KB

Partition ###: Partition 2
Type: Primary
Size: 100 MB
Offset: 13 GB

Partition ###: Partition 3
Type: Primary
Size: 90GB
Offset: 13 GB

Partition ###: Partition 4
Type: Primary
Size: 4075 MB
Offset: 104GB

Please note partition 1 was labelled PQ Service which looks like the recovery partition of the old Acer computer.

Thanks,
A

Alkay2020

Hello again,
Here is another update which is mostly copied and pasted from a ticket I logged with Acer Support and I am not getting any assistance.
Emails are going back and forth without really addressing the issue.

I also tried contacting their technical support line where I was told to contact Microsoft. Cloning was not supported also.

Surely there has to be a way to achieve what I want to do. This should be relatively simple.

The old computer HDD OS details are: Windows 10 Home Version 1903(OS Build 18362.592)

All I need to do is transfer my existing OS from the old Acer computer HDD to the new Acer computer. Model: AX-3900.
The old computer HDD is a MBR Volume.
The old computer HDD partitions have been resized to fit on the SSD in the new Acer computer. Model: TC-885

Cloning the old HDD in either MBR or GPT volumes to the new SSD still produces the initial error on the new TC-885 I reported: Reboot and Select proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in selected device and press a key.

I have cloned the old HDD several times.
A clone of the old HDD boots on another computer in both MBR and GPT Volumes.

I have reset the defaults in the Acer BIOS with no effect.
How do I enable MBR booting in the Acer BIOS?
If I can do that I may be able clone the old Acer HDD to the SSD and then convert it to GPT instead of using MBR and have another Acer computer that is working again with updated and faster hardware.

I do not want to be reinstalling windows. I want to keep the existing OS, programs and files as they were on the old Acer computer and update the new computer with the required drivers which I can do myself.

Thanks,

Alkay2020

I forgot to mention I have tried setting a Supervisor Password and disabling Secure Boot in the Acer BIOS.
This produces the same error too.
Thanks,
A.

Alkay2020

Surely there must be some way to get this new Acer computer to work without reinstalling Windows?
I have received the following response from Acer support team:

Acer has not released the latest BIOS version for this model yet with an option for MBR boot.

We wish to inform you that this type of concern is best assisted by our premium support department which is the Out of Scope team with the service cost of AU$74.80 for successful troubleshooting assistance.

They are the best department to provide you proper assistance about clone operating system concerns.

Please contact our Out of Scope team at 1800 144 519 for real-time assistance.

In the meantime, your ticket number for this transaction is 200128-006070.

Kind Regards,

billsey

Sorry for being so slow in answering... You won't be able to clone the old MBR system drive to the new setup. You need GPT and those special small partitions (100MB, 4GB, 13GB; likely UEFI boot, Recovery boot, Recovery image). If you have the OS up and running, without all the extra stuff you want to move over, you should only be dealing with the C: drives. You *might* be able to use robocopy or xcopy from a diagnostic boot to copy the contents of the old partition over the contents of the new partition in order to get the old stuff booted far enough to do an in-place upgrade to get the drivers and such cleaned up. It'd be awfully easy to screw the disk contents up trying that, but you wouldn't be any worse off since you can always just do another new install to the SSD and then try the copy again.

So this is what I'm envisioning: you have the system booting to a clean Windows 10 install on the SSD. You shut down and physically install the old drive, either in a USB case or to a SATA port in the machine. You boot up onto the SSD and verify the contents of the HDD are visible. Insert your W10 install media and restart to the install. Select Repair and navigate to the command prompt. At this point you are sitting on the X: drive with likely a C: and D : (or E:) mounted. Discover which of those drives in the main partition on the SSD and which is the main partition on the HDD. Use xcopy or robocopy to copy the contents of the HDD partition to the SSD partition, overwriting duplicated files. Shutdown and remove the HDD. Boot up on the SSD and see if everything crashes or runs. See? Simple.

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