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Jason JohanknechtFlag for United States of America

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Unbootable Windows 7 HDD after clone

Have 2 Dell computers that came in today, both with failing hard drives.  The drives are successfully cloned over to new HDD.  However, upon installing the new drives into their machines no OS is found.  Both computers are running Windows 7 64-bit.  So, no big deal I will repair the MBR (Both systems predate UEFI).  I pop in an OEM Windows 7 Home (or Pro depending on OS installed) and it tells me "This version of system recovery is not compatible..."  Now I haven't needed to dig out a Windows 7 disc in a long time, so I may be forgetting something here.  I wanted to run bootrec /rebuildbcd and so on commands.  I have attempted to run these commands from my USB media for Windows 10 also, with no success of any kind.  I have tried multiple Discs (Even tried Home in the Pro system and vice versa).  I have confirmed they are running 64-bit OS.  As the old drives do boot, but it takes like 15 minutes to do so.  Old drives show many bad sectors.  I am currently running CHKDSK /r on each drive in another system and will reclone to see if that helps.  Note: The clone software did have to skip some sectors that were unreadable.  I have been using that cloning software (Many revisions worth that is), for more than a decade.  I am unable to download the Windows 7 ISO to make non OEM version, due to MS says they are vendor specific product keys that I cannot download.  I have had many people download an ISO to reinstall or repair Dell computers over the year.  Why has that changed now too?
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Coolie Sheppard
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In the BIOS, is the disk ACHI?  if it's not change it to that and see if it recongizes the drive and boot.  

Also, for bootable USB, change the boot device to legacy and make the USB the primary.  see if it boots from there now
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Disk is AHCI (only other option is RAID).  USB Media boots just fine.  These are old computers before UEFI.  No legacy options.  I have found that the OS partition cloned just fine on both, but the other partitions not so much.  I ran CHKDSK on both, and they fail to finish stage 5 with unrecoverable errors.
I just made an image of one, and I had to ignore some bad sectors...  But it shows all partitions and files within.  I am going to try a restore to the new drive and see if anything changed.  

Please comment with any other thoughts.  Hoping this was just having to rebuild boot sector.  Which I always have to do on Lenovo Windows 7 computers.
since you had to skip bad sectors the bad sector could have been in a critical area.  It is always a crap shoot if it will work or not.  Run Spinrite or Hard Disk Regenerator on the bad drive and see if it can recover/restore enough for you to image it again.
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Because this is a DELL OEM CD (P/N 0KJX6D), it will ONLY work on Dell computers that have the Dell COA on them.
Thanks for all the suggestions.  I do have paid versions of data recovery, partition recovery, and so on.  I have not gone that route yet.  However, I now have a clone that has all of the partitions from one of the systems.  At least for this one, I think it is just a matter of rebuilding the boot information.  The bad sectors could very well be file names of corrupt information, thus non working.  I will continue on both paths.

I am looking for any of our old Dell DVDs.  I think we threw them out last year during a move.  Or at the bottom of a box in storage.  I will acquire another from either Efrimpol or area techs who probably still have one.
Found a Windows 7 Pro SP1 Dell DVD!  It has the same error attempting repair "This version of system recovery Options is not compatible".
what software did you use for the clone?  I've had great success using Casper where drives were just not able to be cloned with others due to far to many bad sectors.
Acronis True Image 2017.  I have 2018, but don't like it as much.  Have all the versions going back for over a decade.
I will try the boot order idea asap.  Phsyically the connections I haven't looked at either.  The Pro computer is a laptop though.
You can download and try Casper for 30 day trial, I did so and ended up purchasing a technician license. I've used Acronis, Ghost, and a slew of others over the years and this one is hands down the best one I've tried.  
https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/trial/
cloning dad drives will give a corrupted image - so first repair the drives !
The drive was not repairable.  Yet it still boots and works in Windows (Original HDD).  Acronis does amazing job getting a working clone for many years.  From time to time, they don't work like these two.  I have used Casper in the past, and had bad luck with their software.  That was a long time ago, and will give them another shot based on your current experiences Jeff.

I have installed an OS successfully on the computer and been running that for over a day without issue.  So I know the system can run stable.  I will give another shot at the clone.  Appreciate any other ideas that everyone might have.

Note: I have run the repairs three times on that specific drive.
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I have tried the software that I normally use to recover data/partitions and repair disks.  CHKDSK /r for example gets to stage 5 and stops with unrepairable message.  They all error out at some point during process.  This will be the first drive that boots that I could not repair.  I don't use any free software, but not ruling out the possiblity if someone has good suggestion.  Never heard of HDD regenerator, I will give that a look.
and what software did you use?
Client has requested a clean OS install instead of clone on the laptop.  Second client will decide on Friday which direction to go.  No further attempts until then.
ok - post results
Thanks to everyone who responded.  I was not able to repair either drive to the point where a clone was a working drive.  But I learned of many new programs that may aid me on the next time it occurs.  I expected a low chance either drive was going to work properly, and both clients have decided to move forward just recovering the data, and a new drive with a clean OS install.
well - i had very good experiences with HDDReg