Advice request re: SSD to NVME transplant
My goal: changing a Samsung 860 EVO SSD for a Samsung 970 NVME, both 1TB, in a Lenovo Thinkpad T580. This is laptop A, or LA. LA is a core i7 with 32 GB RAM.
I also have another Lenovo Thinkpad T580. This is laptop B, or LB. LB is a Core i5 with 16GB RAM.
LB was mine for a long time and had the 860 SSD inside. I purchased LA with the better specs for myself with the goal of giving LB to my wife. LA came with a 500GB NVME drive. So to get going quickly, I simply swapped the drives. Minutes later I had a brand new laptop (LA), but with all my regular software and congifs in place. My wife's LB was bare OS, so she could start using the laptop as well.
I then purchased the 1TB 970 NVME to install in LA. Being a former user of Acronis True Image (I have versions 2010 and 2012), I decided to purchase Acronis 2020 to transplant my stuff from the 860 SSD to the 970 NVME.
I tried multiple things without success, until I stumbled upon a post of Steve on how NOT to clone.
So I decided to follow his advice and went with a regular backup instead of a clone, but using the Recovery Kit option. I backed up my entire 860 SSD to an external 1TB USB drive (7200 RPM).
Here's the catch: LA has a BIOS supervisor password that I don't know. This makes the BIOS read-only for me. I can't change anything in the boot sequence nor can I bring back the excluded boot devices that are currently ignored, among which any USB drive.
So I thought I would use LB for the transplant instead. It boots fine using the external USB drive to the Acronis recovery OS/tools, so that means it sees the recovery partition. However my .tbix backup file is nowhere to be seen on the drive. Acronis does not see the backup partition, even though I renamed it to NVMEBACKUP and purposely gave it letter N in Disk Management, just to easily distinguish it. Can't see that anywhere. If I plug the USB drive in LA (with my 860 SSD in to boot), the backup file is right there on the root of the drive.
Both LA and LB are UEFI machines and both can boot using the 860 EVO SSD and the 500GB NVME that came with LA.
Is this tough enough for you? It is for me!
Thanks in advance for reading this story.
Alain
Thanks for the suggestions Steve. I will answer yours questions and make the test you recommend today and provide feedback.
Hi Steve,
I'm already quite aware of the supervisor password/motherboard replacement condition, especially for the long run. This is a used laptop I purchased from a university student. I did check the BIOS when I purchased it but I didn't notice the read-onlyness of the settings at first. You do get a password prompt when you try to access it and you can press Enter without entering a password, which is precisely how you get to the BIOS in ready-only mode. I don't know how much a laptop motherboard costs but I will try to live with this one as long as possible. One option for me would be to keep the 860 EVO SSD, or move back to LB with the 970 NVMe.
Yes, the 500GB NVMe drive was the only drive installed in LA and yes, both NVMe drives are M.2.
My 860 SSD has Windows 10 Home 64-bit. I'm surprised to notice that the 500GB NVMe has... Windows 10 Education Edition. Hmmm. I'm starting to wonder what I purchased. But anyway this drive is not involved in the cloning (or backup/restore).
I'll go ahead with the test later today, staty tuned.
Hello Steve,
I tried the test you suggested. In fact I tried all boot options I had in that menu, even the legacy stuff (FDD in 2020?) just in case there would be a disconnect between the naming and the hardware detected. ALL options bring me back in Windows 10, so in reality the system keeps using the Windows Boot Manager no matter what I do.
Why is ATI 2020 just not seeing that backup file on the external HD? It seems as if it cannot see the larger partition on the drive.
I have an external NVMe USB-C enclosure. Would there be an option to clone the 860 SSD live in LA while the 970 EVO is connected through the enclosure?
Alain, given the password situation and the inability to access the BIOS settings, then your options are going to be very limited for your LA laptop. Effectively you would not be able to recover this laptop without using another computer and this has the downside of potentially introducing new device drivers for hardware found in the second computer that are not needed by the first one.
It is difficult to say why ATI 2020 isn't seeing your backup on your external 1TB HDD - is this visible in Explorer on LA when that drive is attached?
I have an external NVMe USB-C enclosure. Would there be an option to clone the 860 SSD live in LA while the 970 EVO is connected through the enclosure?
I wouldn't recommend using an external NVMe USB-C enclosure for cloning when a laptop drive is involved as per the statements below:
Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.
Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:
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, as 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. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.
What you could try doing would be as follows:
Install the new Samsung 970 NVMe M.2 SSD in LB and remove any other drives from that laptop.
Boot LB from your Acronis Rescue Media in UEFI boot mode with the SATA 860 SSD connected via a USB adapter / cable.
Clone from the 860 SSD to the 970 SSD then shutdown when all is complete.
Note: Do not attempt to boot into Windows 10 on LB from the 970 SSD.
Remove the 970 SSD from LB and install in LA as the only disk drive, then attempt to boot into Windows from the new drive.
If all is ok, then reinstall the original drive back in LB to put it back to how it was before doing the above.
Found a video on reset of supervisor password on a Lenovo T430. Apparently you can jumper 2 pins on the motherboard while pressing the F1 key during boot to which gives you access to the bios as if the machine were new. You can reset the password to blank by hitting Enter key twice while jumper is in place.
Thanks Enchantech but I've found a few of these and they all refer to older laptops with different security chips. The one in my T580 is stated in the BIOS as being of type TPM 2.0, which according to my reading and interpretation ultimately gets controlled by the OS. In any case I did tear the motherboard out to check the underside layout in hopes to find the said chip, without success.
Thanks for the post though.
Steve,
I made the decision to revert to LB, sacrificing the i7. It's clocked slower than the i5 anyway (1.8 Ghz vs. 2.5 Ghz) and other than during occasional amateur video post-production and photoshopping, I don't think I'm really using 8 threads. In fact, now that I've swapped the RAM, 860 SSD and keyboard (my wife uses a French layout), this laptop feels snappier than LA now. I can only imagine with the 970 NVMe.
I don't have any extra SATA enclosure or cable handy so I've ordered one from Amazon. When I get this I will try your suggestion. I have a feeling it will work this time with the one-pass cloning technique.
Thanks for your time and I'll post results here when I get the chance to experiment this.