850 evo cloned, no boot

[TwoBills]

I just bought an 850 evo 120GB to replace my Dell laptop's oem (Kingston) 32GB ssd. Windows 8.1. I used Samsung's migration software and an external enclosure to clone the original ssd. Everything went by the numbers until I installed the new ssd. It won't boot. All I get is the Dell symbol on a black screen.
The migration instructions state that the oem recovery partition won't be cloned, and it wasn't.

Does this partition play a part in the boot process with UEFI?
Could secure boot be the cause of no boot?
I noticed the drive letter was changed to D. Problem?
Could I solve this problem by using a different cloning software (Macrium)?

I see a lot of people online with the same problem, but no solution that I could find. So, here I am. Shoud've made this my first stop.

 

[corkyg]

I cloned three 850 EVOs using Acronis TI 2016'; bootable Rescue Media. All booted. When cloning, the best advice I can give is, regardless of software, never clone from within Windows. Your result sounds like an alignment problem of the final product. The cloning software should be able to let you choose between MBR and UEFI, and direct or proportional.

 

[Charlie98]

When cloning, the best advice I can give is, regardless of software, never clone from within Windows.

:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

 

[Ketchup]

Acronis is nice because the free trial period will let you do everything, you only need to buy it if you want to.

Yeah, I could see a problem with the Samsung software if it is not getting all partitions. There should be several, even if the recovery partition is not included.

 

[TwoBills]

Thanks for the replies. After looking into this further I find that the fat32 esp partition isn't cloning. I'm going to try Acronis before getting out of Windows. That's a whole new beast for me.

 

[John Connor]

You can also check out AOMEI backuper. It has an offline PE environment ISO image to burn to disk or USB as well. I've just used it in Windows and it has worked. Actually, I've use a PE USB drive to clone my netbook to another USB.

You wouldn't have two physical drives, would you? Because if you installed Windows on the SSD with another drive installed at the same time, your boot loader could very well be on the second drive.