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Recovery to external USB-attached SATA SSD

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I take whole disk backups weekly, and need to prove that they work. This was not a problem on an older PC but now on a P50 Thinkpad it is.  Any suggestions would be welcome ...

Setup is as follows:

P50 has 2 x internal 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD

And I have a USB3.0 attached (inateck FE2008C with UASP) 512GB Samsung 850 SSD.

I read that ATI can not / will not recover to an internal drive in a laptop. That seems a harsh decision because it takes away a possible test/recovery path.

So I thought about recovering to the USB drive which the machine can boot from (despite Acronis saying that Windows can't boot from USB drives).

However .... my attempts to do that have been frustrated.  Neither the normal recovery disk, nor one created with WinPE are able to (it seems) provide the correct driver for the P50's ethernet interface, so I cannot communicate with the NAS where the image is stored.

Have come to a dead end.    Help anyone ????   Thanks.

 

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David, see the forum post http://forum.acronis.com/forum/100770 for detailed information on how to add additional device drivers to your WinPE Rescue Media.

I am not sure about the veracity of the statement that ATI can not / will not recover to an internal drive in a laptop?

That is the most common type of recovery performed using ATI as far as I am aware, and certainly one I have used myself on numerous occasions.  Am I missing something here in terms of the context of this statement?

The restriction on booting from external USB devices is most definitely a Windows one, not Acronis.  The key here as far as I understand it, is how Windows sees the external drive - if it sees it as a removable drive then it cannot be used to boot, however if it sees it as a non-removable / fixed disk drive, then it is possible to boot from it.

I have booted from an external USB drive that was prepared, IIRC, using PenDrive Linux or something very similar - it was a few years ago when I was experimenting with different boot options.  The main downside I found was if I forgot to unplug the USB drive when wanting to boot from Windows and found myself booting from whatever flavour of Linux I had as the boot OS on the drive instead.

Thanks Steve.

I was referring to https://kb.acronis.com/content/2931 in my statement about internal disks. I agree my words were not well chosen: I was attempting to CLONE from an internal disk TO another internal disk. Which is forbidden - shame, would be so useful. I agree recovery to internal disk is ok, but for testing purposes I don't want to risk over-writing my good drive and hence the external USB/SATA drive.

Thanks for the tip re drivers with WinPE - I will follow that up.

Perhaps you can advise something I'm unsure of: if I was to boot Windows on my external drive (having done a test recovery), is there any risk of corruption to my internal "c:" drive?   Will Windows assign it a different (temporary) drive letter and will it revert to "C:" once I reboot without the external drive?

     

 

 

David,

You won't be able to boot Windows from an external USB drive unless you've made a Windows-2-go drive (only available in enterprise versions) - there are 3rd party tools that can do this as well though, but natively, not possible with just moving a bootable Windows OS from an internal drive to an external drive.  

In your case, you would have to swap the newly cloned drive into your system to test the boot capability.  You can then put the original drive in the USB dock/external case and have it connected as well; however, I would just not plug it in until after Windows has booted up since a clone effectively clones the hardware ID of the old disk to the new one and may confuse the bios when booting up (even though the USB drive would technically not be bootable).

 

Wow those instructions ... not trivial !!  And they assume that one knows which device is not working.  In my case I *think* it's the ethernet, but could be something else.  Sounds like trial & error .... like most of computing !!    I'll give it a go soon.

Re swapping my drives: I'm not aware of any external enclosure (yet) to take M.2 format drives (since they hang off the PCI bus), and I'm reluctant to physically remove them as it's also non-trivial.  Not quite as simple as unplugging a SATA drive, and much more care needed.

And my machine doesn't have any internal SATA abiliity (though I think I could purchase an adapter kit) - just the M.2 drives.

Thanks for all the guides/links.

I agree.  Certainly not as easy to do with the newer NVME PCIE drives.  I typcially don't clone either though.  I usually take a full disk image and restore the image to the new drive (or when recovering).  Everyone has their own preference though.

Enchantech and I saw these adapters - have not tried yet, but am tempted since the one from Amazon should be easy to return if it is the wrong one as the reviewers say.  The picture does show the correct adatper though so maybe this particular seller had no idea about the difference and is providing the wrong one.  

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QA1QD7W/ref=s9_simh_gw_g147_i1_r?ie…

and ebay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/M-2-NGFF-PCIe-SSD-6Gbps-to-USB-3-0-Converter-Ad…

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-3-0-to-SATA-2-5-Hard-Disk-to-M-2-NGFF-PCI-E…

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-3-0-to-SATA-22P-2-5-Hard-Disk-to-Mini-PCI-E…~

 

Hi David,

Your post prompted me to have a look at your machine specs on the Lenovo site.  In your last post you mention that the P50 does not have any SATA capability.  The specs tell a different story.  The default bare bones configuration is a single SATA III drive.  If during ordering configuration you choose not to select a hard drive then a single 512GB NVMe SSD becomes the default configuration.  If you select a hard drive the Lenovo configurator will then allow you to select up to 2 of the NVMe drives.  This indicates that the P50 can be equiped with a total of 3 drives.  I will say however that sometimes these configurators will allow you to spec something that in reality you cannot get!

The P50 specs also indicate that the laptop supports RAID 0 and 1.  Presumably then if your laptop was configured with 3 drives you could configure the 2 SSD's in either a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration.  You should also be able to configure the laptop with just the 2 SSD"s in either one of these RAID modes.   Is your laptop configured in either of these modes?

Your assumption that it is a problem with your network as to why you cannot access your NAS with the WinPE boot media is probably correct.  I think it is a safe assumption that the WinPE recognizes your network NIC but in order to use it to access your network share you would need to map that share to a drive letter using the net use command as in the following example:

net use y: \\ComputerName\ShareName /user:UserName password

This should allow you to see and use your NAS network share.

You've got quite a powerhouse of a machine here!  Did you purchase the machine in a pre-configured state or did you order it per your spec?

 

V sorry for delay.

Yes P50 has SATA but since I configured 2 x NVMe SSD's (only) Lenovo did not put a SATA cable in the SATA bay (currently empty).  I guess I could buy a cable with a bit of luck. 

I did think of ordering the RAID config but did not.  I read online that it's not possible (a BIOS issue?) to configure the disks for RAID after shipment.

I have today seen a Lenovo advisory which supplies the INF files for the ethernet and storage drivers. See: http://support.lenovo.com/gb/en/downloads/ds105977

WinPE did not even let me ping, never mind map the drive!  I think the ethernet was totally dead.  When I get time I'll try to build the WinPE disk to include those INF files etc.

Yes as discussed this machine was to my spec. Nice machine. A pity software has to be involved!

I think you are on the right track, build a new WinPE and install the INF drivers for the NIC and storage and you should be able to get it to work.