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Cloning to an SSD

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I have only been using TI for a couple of weeks. I am planning to replace the 500 Gb hard drive in my laptop with a 500 Gb SSD. I assumed I could put the SSD in a USB enclosure, plug it into the laptop, clone the internal hard drive to the SSD, shutdown, replace the hard drive with the SSD, power up and be done.

Then I read the manual, which says:

"We recommend that you install the target (new) drive where you plan to use it and the source drive in another location, for example, in an external USB enclosure. This is especially important for laptops."

Then the manual says to start TI and describes how to proceed with the clone process. Well, if I put the new blank SSD "where I plan to use it", which is in the laptop I will not be able to start TI or anything else. In the discussion about migrating to an SSD the manual makes a statement to the effect that an SSD will always have less space than a hard drive, therefore, cloning will not work. The manual sounds like it is saying that a 500 Gb SSD has less usable space than a 500 Gb hard drive. I don't understand how that is possible.

Sorry for the long post but my basic question is, will the procdure outlined in the first paragraph work for a laptop drive running Win7 Pro 64 bit? Thanks.

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Bazsl wrote:
In the discussion about migrating to an SSD the manual makes a statement to the effect that an SSD will always have less space than a hard drive, therefore, cloning will not work. The manual sounds like it is saying that a 500 Gb SSD has less usable space than a 500 Gb hard drive. I don't understand how that is possible.
Thanks.

Clearly that is not the case. The point they are (unsuccessfully) making is that SSD tend to be smaller capacity that HDD. They can be a small as 60gig, with best-bang-for-bucks size about 250gig. Mechanical HDD can go up to 8TB, whereas the largest consume SSD are 1 TB and VERY expensive. I saw a recent report of SSD that was 2TB.

The general view of Forum experts is that cloning is best done from CD or USB stick rather than while running Windows. If you do so you will be able to do the cloning with the SSD in place.

I have only done cloning on desktop where I could add the target drive to the PC before doing the clone.

Ian

The Clone process should be run from the Recovery Media that you create using the Media Builder tool in the Windows installed app. You can create this media on a USB flash drive by simply installing a blank drive of at least 8GB in size in the laptop prior to starting the TI 2016 app. Once the app is started go to Tools, select Media Builder and you will have a choice of creating a Linux based recovery media (recommended) or a WinPE version (more difficult).

Once you have created the media you will need to boot the machine to that media to perform the process which will require setting boot priority in your machine bios to that of the media you created.

All other recommended steps which you mentioned above need to be followed.

Thanks. I missed the fact that I can run Clone from the recovery media. That makes the whole process easier.

Bill

Hi Enchantech

your explenatin sounds good, I nearly tired to do the same as Bazsl, i try to move my sytem from HDD 750gb to SSD 500gb. The backup and recover to the SSD did work, but I can't boot. I think it depends that my original drive, which is dynamic. but not sure.
Do you have any idea? Or do you know how to make the recovery bootable, attached the system Drive 0 is original drive 1 is the recoverd one

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Mario,

Are you working on a laptop or desktop machine?

Your screenshots look very odd, Disk 0 shows 4 volumes with drive letter F. How did you manage that?

I take it you can boot to drive 0 but not to drive 1 correct?

Have you tried to disconnect drive 0 from the machine and then see if the machine will boot?

As for your screenshot of drive 0 having those additional F volumes showing in the graphical view of Disk Management but not in the Volume view indicates to me that Windows is ignoring those partition volumes because of invalid drive letter assignment. Did you attempt to use the Clone tool and that created the results we see here?

Hi,

I work on a Laptop. drive0 is the original drive i got this with this 4 volumes (1. system 2. windows 3. hp backup 4. hp any bullshit...
I did add an additional volume to manage all my programes/ games and so on. After this windows did change my drive fron Basic to dynamic.

Yes i tried to boot without drive 0 .

I did delete the drive 3 and 4 (hp) and did add them to drive F the result you can see, I believe the reason is the dynamic drive version. I also read the disc director will be able to modify from dynamic to basic. But I don't know how. It looks like not with datas on the drive. but if the drive must be empty than I don't need Acronic. my dear money :-(

Mario,

My suggestion for you would be to use a third party partitioning tool to fix your drive 0 as what you have ended up with there is quite a mess. I prefer Minitool Partition Wizard for such tasks but the choice is yours. Partition Wizard can convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk without data loss. You can also clear up the partitioning of the drive with this tool. Once you have disk 0 whipped into shape you can then use True Image to clone disk 0 to disk 1. I caution however that you only do so following all recommended procedures for cloning a laptop. I also recommend that before you run the clone again that you create a full disk backup of disk 0 and validate that backup so that if something does go wrong you will at least have a backup of your system drive to breath life back into the machine.

Hi Enchantech,

I got it solved. I did that what you told. I used disc director to remove the partioning of drive 0. This means reduce size of dirve F: to possible minimum size (about 136gb of 500gb were in use) than I had only3 allocated partions (System/ C/ and one F. After this change I could convert drive 0 back to basic. And than all was easy, backup/ clone/ disc change start and all was working as expected. Thanks a lot Enchantech for your help!

Cheers Mario