Transfer HDD to SSD
I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Y510P with Microsoft Windows 8.1 Professional with Media Center Update 1 64 bit and it is successfully activated. I purchased Acronis True Image 2015 and successfully activated it. I made a full disk image backup onto my Western Digital My Cloud Personal Cloud 4.0 TB network attached storage drive. I set it to perform differential backups every month right after Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates are dispatched. I have a Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 1.0 TB 7,200 RPM laptop hard disk drive. I just purchased a Crucial M550 1.0 TB solid state disk and it will be delivered tomorrow to my apartment because today is Veteran's Day in the United States of America.
I did a lot of research and I need a little bit of extra help and tips. I successfully created an Acronis boot media on a blank CD-R and USB 2.0 thumb drive. My understanding is that once I perform today's differential backup and it gets successfully validated, then I should be ready to proceed. I will need to shut down my PC and turn it off to disconnect all of the cables and close the lid and flip it over gently. I will remove the bottom plate using my PC Technician toolkit and I will replace the Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 HDD with the Crucial M550 SSD. Then, I will put the bottom plate back in and flip it over and open the lid. I will plug in my power plug, my Gigabit Ethernet cable, and my USB 2.0 mouse along with the Acronis USB 2.0 thumb drive with the rescue boot media. I will press and hold down the F2 button and turn on the power to select the Boot Manager and I will boot off the USB 2.0 thumb drive into the Acronis True Image 2015 rescue environment. I plan to tell Acronis to find my WD My Cloud and I will log into my administrator account. Then, I will tell Acronis to find my disk images and I will put in my password to unlock the encrypted disk image backups. Then, I will follow the instructions and perform a full disk image restoration with the Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD as the target drive. This should take a couple of hours. Once that is done, I can exit the Acronis rescue environment and shut down my PC. I will unplug the Acronis USB 2.0 thumb drive and I will power on my notebook PC. It should boot off the Crucial M550 SSD and I should be able to use my PC albeit it will be much much faster.
I used Microsoft Bitlocker to encrypt my C: drive. Will this be preserved when I use the Acronis rescue environment to restore my disk images to my Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD?
Do I need to check to ensure Microsoft Windows 8.1 Professional with Media Center Update 1 64 bit is activated after the Acronis restoration process?
Do I need to turn on Microsoft Bitlocker and re-encrypt my Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD after the Acronis restoration process is completed?
What happens if my Crucial M550 SSD does not boot up? I checked the Crucial website and there are no Microsoft Windows 8.1 64 bit device drivers available for me to download. Do I need to run the Acronis True Image 2015 Universal Restore with UEFI? How do I do that?
Do I need to perform a validation of the encrypted disk images prior to performing an Acronis full system restoration onto the Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD?
What else do I need to know or what tips do you have for me?
It should become clear that I think that I know what I need to know to make this work. My gut feeling is that I can trust Acronis True Image 2015 to perform the hard work for me and I can just wait until everything is transferred to the Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD without any need for modifications since both the Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 and Crucial M550 SSD are 1.0 TB each. I trust that Acronis True Image 2015 will perform the alignment onto the Crucial M550 SSD automatically.
Please reply soon as I plan to do this sometime this Wednesday or Thursday of this week. Thank you for all of your help and tips.
I just got my Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD in less than one minute ago. Now, I have to wait for Microsoft Corporation to dispatch their Patch Tuesday updates. Next, I have to wait for the differential disk image backup and validation to proceed later this afternoon onto my WD My Cloud Personal Cloud 4.0 TB. I also have to wait for replies to my thread to see if I'm missing any critical information that I need to know. Thank you for reading and posting replies.
I use Microsoft Bitlocker with AES 256 bits encryption for my C: drive. When I use Acronis True Image 2015, it takes a very long period of time to perform the first full disk image backup and the successive differential disk image backups. I checked the file sizes and it appears to be doing a sector-by-sector disk image backup even though I did not select to enable this option.
I remember Acronis True Image Premium 2014 was much faster than 2015 version. What is going on here?
I have some hidden partitions on my Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 1.0 TB 7,200 RPM laptop hard disk drive. Do I need to know something about preserving these hidden partitions? I use Acronis True Image 2015 to do a disk based backup rather than a partition based backup. I checked to see that this disk based backup includes all of the partitions on my Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 laptop hard disk drive.
So, I am thinking that after I perform the differential disk image backup later this afternoon after Microsoft Patch Tuesday today, I will be ready to transfer my HDD to SSD. However, this might take an additional two days to finish the differential disk image backup.
I'm hoping that I have done my homework, but I need help from this community to let me know what I'm missing. Thank you.
When you use BitLocker, Acronis will do a full sector-by-sector backup. Even the information of unoccupied sectors is backed up. This is now the default behavior, even if you backup from within Windows. Ealier versions were doing a regular backup when performed from Windows after windows has enabled access to the disk.
The good thing though, is that automatically all necessary information (and then less useful information) will be included in the backup data.
Simply complete your backup, remove your current disk from the system, boot the computer on the recovery medium (do not start the restore operation from Windows), and restore your backup onto the new SSD.
I don't remember how a whole disk sector by sector backup behaves when restored to a disk of different size. If Acronis tells you there is not enough space, you might not be able to restore.
You can consider decrypting your OLD disk first, then backing it up, then restoring, then turning bitlocked back on. That way, you will make sure that Bitlocker handling issues are not in the way of a regular and common operation (migrating a boot disk from HDD to SSD).
Frankly, if you are partient enough to go through the decrypting and re-encrypting, this would be my recommendation.
I accessed the Windows 8.1 Charms side bar and I searched for diskmgmt.msc and I ran it with administrator privileges. My Disk 1 is my Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 1.0 TB 7,200 RPM hard disk drive. It contains the following partitions:
1. 1000 MB healthy recovery partition
2. 260 MB healthy EFI System
3. 1000 MB health OEM partition
4. 885.92 GB Windows8_OS C: healthy system drive [boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition]
5. 25.0 GB D: Lenovo healthy primary partition
6. 18.26 healthy (recovery partition)
If I did my math correctly, then it totals 931.44 GB for my Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 laptop hard disk drive.
I set Acronis True Image 2015 to backup the entire disk 1 partition including all of the partitions along with the hidden partitions.
The Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD has 1024 GB of which 954.0 GB will be available for storage after formatting it and installing Windows 8.1 64 bit.
So, I should be good to go right? Given everything that I wrote and posted, I should be able to perform a successful Acronis True Image 2015 system restoration if I follow the instructions carefully, right?
I set the backup to perform validation after each full and differential disk image backup. This verifies the disk image backup to ensure it is "good." Do I need to boot into the Acronis rescue environment on my USB 2.0 thumb drive and perform validation of my disk image backup sets prior to proceeding with the actual system restoration process onto the Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD? The Acronis True Image 2015 instructions state that this is one of the required steps, but I'm not sure and I need some clarification.
What else do I need to know?
I'm thinking that this is going to be much easier and smoother than I make it seem to be. I just want to double and triple check with the experts here. Hopefully, it will work and I won't have to bother the nice people here again for a long time. Thank you.
Since it's doing a sector-by-sector disk backup, my Microsoft Bitlocker should be preserved once I am done with the Acronis True Image 2015 system restoration onto my Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD, correct? I will not need to turn it back on and re-encrypt the SSD, right? I should have enough available disk capacity to do the system restoration onto the Crucial SSD, right?
Yes, the Bitlocker should be preserved, but I don't recall the behavior when you restore on a different disk/different size. With a full disk sector by sector, I anticipate you need at least the same size as the original disk to restore...
Yes, both the Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 and the Crucial M550 are 1.0 TB each. According to Acronis True Image 2015, my differential disk image backup that I'm validating right now is roughly 840.00 GB. The Crucial M550 should have 954.00 GB of available disk space. So, it should fit which is why I spent more money to get the Crucial M550 1.0 TB SSD rather than a smaller SSD from a different manufacturer.
I'm thinking that I'm going to be just fine. Fingers crossed.
It worked! I successfully made two separate Acronis True Image 2015 disk image backups on two different external desktop hard disk drives and I also booted into the Acronis rescue environment to perform a sector by sector restoration onto my Crucial M550 1 TB SSD. It fits, but there is 22.36 GB of unallocated disk space leftover so I had a little room to spare after the restoration was successful. It took a couple of hours to restore my data, but it was worth it. It did not preserve my Microsoft Bitlocker; so, I had to turn on Microsoft Bitlocker and I made multiple backups of all of my Bitlocker recovery keys. This Crucial M550 SATA-III 6 GB/s 1.0 TB SSD is extremely reliable, speedy, and capacious while offering a good value for the money. I got it on sale from Amazon. Everything works now. This SSD is so super fast and the performance is very high. It's roughly 20 times faster than a laptop hard disk drive.
Acronis True Image 2015 is high quality software that works as advertised. It is well worth the modest cost.
Welly Wu - thanks for all the info, I'm thinking of doing the same with my Lenovo Ideacenter...