From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Sat, 12/20/2025 2:44 PM, Hank Rogers wrote:   
   > Paul wrote on 12/19/2025 8:54 PM:   
   >> The advantage of the Macrium clone, is it generates new unique GUID for   
   >> the blkid, then it fixes the boot menu to point to the new value,   
   >> and what this does, is make the HDD and SSD "independent" of one another.   
   >> The SSD boots whether the HDD is plugged in or not, when done that way.   
   >   
   > I stopped doing it that way after I had a case where macrium didn't do   
   that.  It left the two drives with the same numbers.  I finally figured it out   
   and manually fixed it.   
   >   
   >   
      
   The Macrium Rescue CD (or USB stick) has the Boot Repair option, which can fix   
   that.   
   It too, generates new identifiers.   
      
   When doing that, only the drive you intend to use should be present   
   for the treatment. The other drive can be unplugged while the power   
   is off.   
      
   There are cases that fail while using Macrium Boot Repair.   
   It does not particularly like multi-boot drives (three copies   
   of Windows on one drive).   
      
   What happens in this case is:   
      
   1) Only one of the Windows copies show in the menu.   
   2) While you can try to add the other two back using EasyBCD,   
      usually there are problems afterwards. EasyBCD does not claim   
      to be perfect at UEFI quite yet. It is possible some garbage in the   
      BCD file, adversely affects the outcome.   
   3) You boot using the Windows that is present in the (repaired) menu.   
      
      In an admin terminal   
      
      bcdboot /bcdclean full   
      
      and this removes all signs of the two OS that didn't make it to the menu.   
      
      You can now add back the two missing OSes.   
      Check Disk Management for the actual letters.   
      
      bcdboot D:\Windows   
      bcdboot E:\Windows   
      
      If you are using the Command Prompt terminal while booted from a   
      Macrium RescueCD (or USB stick), the UEFI ESP partition (the first   
   partition,   
      a FAT one) is mapped as W: or so. You can switch to W: and list it   
      with "dir" and verify W: is there. The form of BCDBOOT command   
      that allows specifying the boot partition, then looks like   
      
      bcdboot D:\Windows /s W:   
      
      but doing this isn't usually necessary, unless the menu is completely blown.   
      For example, if W: was completely empty, you could start all over again   
      by doing that.   
      
      There is no Disk Management in Macrium Rescue environment, which makes   
      determination of which letter is which, a bit more difficult.   
      
      I only discovered the W: mapping by accident, while screwing around in   
   there :-)   
      I hadn't expected to find such a thing, but there it was. You would find a   
      Microsoft folder inside it, and if you are multibooting, there can be other   
      ecosystem folders present in there too.   
      
      It's not that making a mapping is difficult, I just thought it was cheeky of   
      them to have mapped it for us. You can temporarily assign a letter to it in   
      diskpart.exe . It is possible Macrium is using W: like my example above.   
      
   HTH,   
       Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)