Windows 10 not booting from SSD cloned from HDD

I have installed an SSD in my laptop as second drive as below:

1. Removed the optical drive from the laptop


2. Removed the primary 1TB HDD from its bay/slot


3. Inserted the 500GB SSD in the bay/slot


4. Inserted the HDD removed in a caddy


5. Inserted the caddy with HDD in the slot from which optical drive was removed.

Both the drives were detected by Windows 10 installed on the laptop. Windows booted from the HDD perhaps since the C drive on it remained as C, despite being in the new slot.

I created two partitions on the SSD - one of 500MB and another of 119.51GB (as exactly on the HDD - smaller one as System Reserved partition while the other for the OS); left the remaining space as unallocated.

Then using Easeus To Do Backup, I cloned the System Reserved and OS partitions on the HDD to respective partitions on the SSD. The clone operation was successful.

Then I removed the caddy with the HDD and tried booting the laptop. But it failed to boot. "A request isn't connected or can't be accessed". Using diskpart from within Windows 10 bootable USB drive, I noticed that the cloned partition on SSD was not C drive. This might explain the problem. I assigned C drive letter to partition with diskpart. No use. And the System Reserved partition had a drive letter (whereas it should not have had one). Tried Startup Repair from the bootable USB, but it was not able to detect the OS.

I inserted the caddy with HDD back in the ODD shot. The laptop booted as the it was now able to find C drive.

How do I make the laptop boot from cloned SSD?