Problem Cloning to an m.2 (Samsung 960 EVO 1TB) (PCIE NVME)
I'm trying to clone my 256GB m.2 to a 1TB m.2. It's a new Windows 10 machine and it supports two m.2 drives as well as an internal drive. The 256GB drive is the boot drive.
Windows recognizes both m.2 drives, and Acronis True Image 2017 accepts the cloning task. Then it reboots and reports that it a bootable agent is waiting for a mountable drive. I'm guessing the intermediate OS (Linux?) doesn't recognize the m.2 drives.
Adjusting the settings doesn't seem to affect anything.
1. Is there a way to solve this without purchasing additional hardware? (I.e., is there a way to get Acronis to recognize the drives in the intermediate OS, or can I boot off a DVD in Windows, and run Acronis without using Linux?)
2. Can I do it if I get a USB adapter for the new drive? This does require finding an adapter for PCIE NVME drives, and all the ones I see are "B Key" for SATA m.2. If anyone knows of an adapter that will work for the Samsung EVOs, I would appreciate hearing about it.
If Acronis totally will not recognize m.2 drives, and I can find an inexpensive adapter, I could even get two USB adapters, plug both drives into another machine, and clone them that way. But I'd rather not buy more hardware to use just once.
I do have the full, registered True Image 2017.
Thanks very much
Brian,
You will also need to download and use the MVP Tool - CUSTOM ATI WINPE BUILDER in Steve's signature link above and choose the option to add drivers to the WinPE build process.
Thank you for the prompt and thorough responses!
I'm still not quite there yet, though.
I already had Windows ADK, and downloaded the MVP_ATIPEBuilder_v73.
The builder BAT worked fine, and I injected the included drivers for IRST and a Killer NIC. I put the image on a USB and booted to it.
No dice. The m.2 nvme SSDs are still not recognized under Linux.
I'm not getting errors on the boot, but I don't get verbose messaging, no logging appears to be done, and there isn't even an indicator as to the flavor of Linux used.
I tried "Acronis System Report" in the start-up options, and got "no raid disks" before generating a report on all physical volumes. It produced a report that only recognized the SATA SSD and the USB drive.
I'm guessing it is just a matter of finding the correct drivers and copying the files into the image, but I don't even know the flavor of Linux, let alone where in the builder to include their references.
I'm probably missing something obvious.
TIA
The MVP tool is a Windows PE only tool and will not create a Linux based media. When the Media Builder window opens while running the script tool select create a WinPE media. The rest of the process should remain the same.
The script tool will run to completion I believe no matter of user choice on what media to create and I think messaging was disabled to suppress that to the user. I will get something started on that.
No dice. The m.2 nvme SSDs are still not recognized under Linux.
WinPE is Windows based, not Linux... Are you sure you have created the winpe rescue media and are booting that - it should go straight to the login without any menu's or prompts.
A few other questions...
1) Have you initialized and formatted the new 1TB drive as GPT yet from within Windows? If not, attach it as a secondary blank drive and do this with computer management in Windows first. If the drive is not initilaized, it may not be getting picked up at all.
2) Is this a single drive to single drive or are you using an actual RAID or dynamic disk? You can not clone any dynamic or RAID disks. You can only do a full disk backup and restore. The results will be the same, but you must take the backup and store it somewhere else so it can be used for the recovery. If you are trying to clone, dynamic disks will not be available as an option to select from for the clone procedure.
3) What is your system type and what is the RAID controller being used? We're assuming it's an Intel RAID controller - hence the IRST drivers that are included in the MVP winpe builder would be sufficient. However, if you have an LSI controller, rocket raid, or something else third party, you would need to include those RAID controller drivers as well so the winPE media has them at boot.
4) You mention your system has 3 slots for drives - 2 nvme and 1 SATA. Are you sure both ports are m.2 NVME and not one is M.2 SATA and the other is M.2 PCIE NVME? M.2 is just a form factor... on some boards, m.2 slots can be either SATA or PCIE, but on others they are only one at a time, or only support one type. In other instances, having all ports in use may not be supported - for instance, if it is detecting the regular SSD, it may be disabling the other M.2 port. These are things you'll want to check in the user manual to see if there are restrictions and/or limitations of the actual connector (whether it supports both m.2 PCIE NVME drives and/or m.2 SATA drives and/or if having a combination of any drives connected may cause the other hard drive ports to be unusable).
EDIT:
5) Make sure you pick WinPE when you run the MVP tool and the Acronis media builder launches. This is up to the user to select because it launches Acronis to build the media and is expecint you to pick WinPE. If you pick Linux, it's just going to build Linux media and alll of the script changes that prepped it for WinPE will be for nothing.
Success!
Thank you for your wonderful help. There were two additional problems to solve.
Here are more details, in case others might have the same difficulties.
First of all, the machine is an Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) laptop, G752VS (i7). Win 10 Pro development machine, 32GB, build 1607.
The two internal bays consist of two m.2 pcie nvme slots in one bay and one internal SATA bay in the other. The two m.2 slots held the 256GB nvme SSD that came with the machine and a Samsung EVO 960 1TB nvme SSD. I was just trying to clone the existing C: drive (which got completely full just installing my regularly-used software) to the EVO 960. Initial attempts to clone failed, as the Linux boot was unable to read the nvme drives. Hence my initial question here.
After reading the very helpful information about it, I decided to do a backup and restore instead of attempting to clone. Unfortunately, that ran me into the same problem as before, because the restore also runs from Linux, where the nvme drives are not recognized.
So I went to using the script referred to by Steve Smith and Enchantech to restore from the .tid image I'd created in Acronis (on the SATA drive.) Initially, that did not work, either.
The first errors I was running into had to do with booting into Linux, which didn't have the drivers. Once I understood I needed to load the WinPE media, I started getting some strange errors in writing to the USB drives. I tried two different USB drives, and both work consistently, but only once. Something got messed up with each of them after the drive was booted from one time. After once, they didn't allow a second boot. I would do a restart, and the machine would start booting off the USB, and after a minute the machine would shut down before getting anywhere but a blank screen. I deleted all the files and reinstalled the tool several times, getting the same failures each time.
I decided it may be a driver issue with USB, or maybe with the drivers on those particular USBs. The machine has a dvd/rw drive, so I put a dvd-r in, and burned the WinPE image to it, using the tool provided. It worked seamlessly the first time, and I was able to finish the restore (from the .tid to the 1TB drive) with no errors. So problem one was in booting off a USB.
There was still one more issue to overcome. Even though the restore ran with no errors, the system booted from the old drive and not the new. I had selected C: as the new drive letter in Acronis for the restore. It appeared to restore to the new drive and not the old, but the new drive had the two supplemental partitions but unallocated space where the main partition should be. In other words, there was no partition where Acronis said it was restoring the partition. Again, the old partition did not appear to be modified.
I checked that the .tid files were still intact, then rebooted from the (WinPE) dvd. In the simple interface, I changed the drive letter of the old C: partition to L:. Then I ran a restore (of the entire disk but not sector-by-sector) from the .tid files to the new nvme drive, assigning it C:. I don't remember if I dragged the main partition size to its max or if it was done automatically, but once it was done, I rebooted the machine. Drive C: is now 1TB. Drive L: is still there with all its data, but everything seems to be intact and working correctly.
I never had to remove the SSDs, by the way. I just reassigned the drive letters and restored, and it worked.
Huge kudos to Steve Smith and others who made it possible to do this on different hardware. Thanks also to Enchantech and Bobbo_3C0X1 for your help.
Brian
Brian, thank you for your comprehensive feedback and description of how you got this to work for you, I am sure that other users will benefit from this if trying to do the same type of migration.
Glad all is well and working.
as for having both drives connected right after a restore or clone, it's a crap shoot. I don't have issues doing this either, but some bios think they are the same Drive and can result in the boot loader getting messed up on one or both drives. As a recommendation to avoid that possibility, may still be a good idea to only boot with one attached if doing this in the future. At least, until the new drive has booted first on IRS own. You may also have to change the bootorder in the bios, and many people forget to check that.
Fir the USB booting... I'd do a full format on the drive and not just a quick one to be certain the boot loader is written on the build. You should probably have an f12 one time boot menu option where you can specifically pick the USB and see if it shows UEFI and legacy mode too. You want to be sure to boot it in UEFI mode if you have a UEFI install. It may have been trying to use legacy as well.
Do you have any USB 2.0 ports? If so, you could try it as well on one of those. My board only has USB 3 and 3.1, but I keep a legacy card reader with 2.0 port As an add on card, just in case. Usb 3.0 is baked into win 10 though so I would be surprised if that was the real issue, since you're creating WinPE with win 10 adk.
Glad to hear of your success!
USBs are all 3.0+. I hadn't thought about downgrading with an add-on, but I've got one I could use for that. Good idea for the future. I believe they were in UEFI mode, but I'm not certain of that. I did do a full format on the USBs after they failed the first time. Both formatted and tested okay, took the image okay the second time, then died on the second boot again.
I used the BIOS bootloader to boot from the USBs, but after resetting the new drive to C:, just decided to see if it was working without that, and it did.
The real surprise for me was that ASUS does not advertise the machine as supporting two nvme drives. If you used the (still really expensive) 2TB drives, you could have 6TB of SSDs, 4TB of which were nvme. (You'd also spend more for the upgraded memory than you did for the high-end laptop to begin with.)
Anyway, it's working well, now. Thanks again for the help.
I wonder if your board is similar to my Gigabyte. If I go into the bios (F2) and try to use the boot override menu there, it almost always fails to boot a USB drive from there. However, when I use the one time boot menu (f12) it has no issue booting the USB drives. Not sure why that is, but I've gotten in the habit of using F12 only so I can specifically pick UEFI or legacy boot for a USB on this machine and it also seems to be more reliable this way.
you got it working, so not sure if it makes much difference at this point though.
I looked at the ROG site on your machine. They do show and talk about the 2 M.2 NVMe there and also that RAID 0 is supported. A look at the manual sonds to me like you need to specify a new boot device each time you wish to boot the machine to any device other than that of Mindows Boot Manager by adding that device in the boot order.
Booting USB thumb drives can be problematic and are more troubelsome on some machines than others. I run ASUS boards and I have the best luck in boot to USB media by setting the USB media as the desired or first boot device in the boot order. If I use the one time boot menu it sometimes works and sometimes does not. What I have found by experimentation is that if I use the one time menu it takes 2 attempts at booting the USB media to get the thumb drives to boot. I have a ASRock board that boots first time every time using the one time boot menu so it is a crap shoot on how each bios works in regards to device booting.
Had the same problem with Samsung 970 EVO - tried restore (didn’t work) then clone (didn’t work) back to restore (didn’t work) ... then found this thread (never would have figured it out on my own!). Got 90% of the way home... still got this error when trying to boot: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.
Went to the following thread: Restore to Samsung 950 Pro NVMe M.2 - INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. Enchantech posted the solution:
Sounds like your drive is locked. Try the solution in the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ2AW4WAfiA
The experts on this forum saved me after days of grief!!
Jim, thanks for cross referencing the older posts:
Restore to Samsung 950 Pro NVMe M.2 - INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ2AW4WAfiA