The original Dell settings :
Just one NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 drive with the preinstalled Windows 10 on GPT disk format...
containing following partitions: EFI sytem, Microsoft Reserved, Basic Data (OS partition), WINRETOOLS partition and a DELL Support partition.
BIOS: UEFI BIOS, RAID ON, SecureBoot enabled
I want to use this Laptop for my business and therefor I need to boot multiple Win10/Win11 Partitions with different Software/Applications installed.
So I decided to buy the BI Collection and use the BIU for cloning & booting those Win10 OS's in this UEFI system.
Another reason to clone the OS was the slower speed of NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 (Gen3) drive on which Windows was installed and this Dell Laptop was shipped. The Interface supports NVMe PCIe 4.0, so i decided to buy a NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 (x4, 2280) and put the original M.2 into the first one of those 3 free additional slots, which only supports PCIe Gen3 up to 1TB per slot, to have more speed in reading and writing for my multi OS config.
The Installation of BIU 1.33 was successful. BIU installed itself to the current EFI directory and is managing the boot files.
My Tasks and Issues:
- After BIU installation I tried to follow the instruction in the Warning (BI Install Guide) to disable FastBoot in the OS drive's properties in Partiton Work. Unfortunately there was no button to disable the Windows FastBoot option. There was only the button "Details", i pushed it and it said "Unable to mount file system" or something like that. In the partition properties window it says "Bootable: BitLocker". I searched this forum and found out that i have to disable BitLocker in Windows for this drive. The Windows 10 partition starts normally out of the BI's Boot menu. No problems/errors occurred. Then in the Bitlocker configuration in Windows it said that Bitlocker is deactivated for this drive (hmmm). Then i found a workaorund to disable FastBoot for this OS in the Windows power settings. The system boots with no problems after this.
- The next thing i did was to copy the Win10 partition to the new NVMe. I just copied the OS partition, but not the other partitions like "Microsoft Reserved" or WinRE partiton, with the option to add it in Boot menu. After copying it to the drive i tried to boot the clone. It boots but on loading, the Windows User Login screen starts to flicker and it hangs there. The Windows Task bar is sometimes displayed for a second before it disappears again... blackscreen. Back in BIU I checked everything according to the properties of the source OS.
-
In BIOS I also switched from RAID ON to AHCI mode to see if that solves the problem. I didnt really understand why Dell activates this option, but there was no RAID configured of course. I used the method with the Windows command line : then restarting and remove it again with :
Code: Select all
bcdedit/set safeboot minimal
It worked, i didnt have to reinstall Windows 10 after changing to AHCI. Windows boots normal.Code: Select all
bcdedit/deletevalue safeboot
Once again I copied "the still working" original Win10 partition to the new drive. Same problem... it loads basically, but on Login screen it hangs.
After that i deactivated "Secure Boot" in BIOS just to make sure its not the issue... but same problem. - Another problem i encountered was the BCD edit in BIU partition work. If clicking on the button it says "No BCD store"... so i m not able to deactivate Windows Recovery and change the partition paths like in BIBM on a MBR system, if u decide to disable Recovery and copy the \boot directory to Windows root dir and update the link path. Therefor you are not forced to keep any of the additional partitions and just have one bootable Windows10 OS partition which can be copied/cloned for further purposes.
I am relatively new to UEFI and its configs. I appreciate any help. And sorry for my english