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TI2021 Cloning Laptop

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Note: I've never done this before, so be gentle. I am attempting to clone my 128GB nvme to 1TB nvme.

I have tried to clone the drive in my Dell G3 laptop, but with no luck. It hangs up with "one minute remaining". I'm going to post my steps here, and hopefull somebody can tell me if I'm doing something incorrectly, or if I just need to try something else:

  1. Installed TI2021 on my laptop.
  2. Removed SSD (OS drive) and attached it externally.
  3. Installed the new SSD.
  4. Launched the laptop and it booted using the external drive.
  5. I then initialized the new drive so that TI2021 could see it.
  6. Then I opened TI2021 and clicked on Clone.
  7. Chose the external drive as my source.
  8. Chose my new internal drive as my target.
  9. Followed the wizard and started the cloning process.

It's a small ssd (128GB) with about 90 GB used, so it only took about an hour before it stopped progressing (displayed "one minute remaining"). So I waited another three hours and it remained there. 

Did I miss a step or do somthing incorrectly? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jerald

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You could try leaving the original drive in the laptop and then swapping after cloning since it assigns the newly cloned drive the same drive letter. (This makes the new drive invisible to windows until you disconnect your old drive since you can't have two drives with the same name.)

I've also seen someone with a cloning issue who resolved it by reverting to ATI2020. My own experience with ATI2021 was that it said that the cloning process had successfully completed after approx. 1 second - a physical impossibility. I reverted to the 2020 version and it cloned the drive in about 6 minutes, which is what I was seeing with my old (2015) free version that came with my SSD.

Acronis recommends removing the old drive from the laptop first, since there is a risk that the cloned drive will not be able to boot. Please see 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, at Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. 

Thank you for that info, very interesting. I've used an older free Acronis to successfully clone to an SSD attached via USB, only upgraded to the 2020 version in the last week, not tried it with a laptop. It would be nice if it just cloned and didn't make guesses about you wanting to now permanently boot from USB. I know someone that makes a complete drive backup every 3 months, so if they used the latest Acronis they would have to switch drives every time, which would be a pain.

I use for my PC, both drives are internal. Hope it's just straight cloning and not modifying sectors there. Might end up going back to the 2015 version, simpler, but did actually clone.

My last post. Just read the knowledge base, it makes no sense to me to add a bootability fix so that the new clone boots from USB. This feature is mainly going to be used for drive upgrades/replacements. Who boots their main drive from USB, why make that assumption?

If this Acronis applied bootability fix is required to boot from USB then how can their recommendation of removing the original internal drive and booting that externally from USB work, doesn't it need this boot fix first? You've also now maybe got to change bios settings to get the original drive to boot externally. A 1:1 clone seems simpler. I'm now confused!

The confusion here lies in the fact that what is being discussed in reality is the True Image application asking the user if they wish to make their USB drive bootable in order to make a Survival Kit drive.  This is a bug in the application obviously as the user should not be seeing this prompt when creating a clone.