Clone Disk - Need to Complete a Computer Restart?
I have an ageing notebook that runs 24/7. This notebook has a vital application that I use to print t-shirts. I also have installed Acronis 2019 installed on the notebook.
Today I purchased a Crucial 500Gb USB drive and used Clone Disk to make a copy of my 256Gb boot disk. All was going really well and after a few hours a message was displayed stating a complete reboot was required - I think there was something like 2hrs to go at this point. I accepted this and the notebook rebooted. I logged back in when prompted and the usual Windows desktop was displayed.
So, is that it? Has the drive been successfully cloned? No messages and no confirmation that all completed successfully! Not very reassuring.
Can anyone comment on whether this is how it should be?
Many thanks


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Thanks for the reply Steve,
Replacing the hard drive is exactly the plan, not sure when but when the existing spinning disk dies I guess. The reason I'm doing this is to insure me against failure of this laptop as it runs Windows 7 and some software that's irreplaceable!
I did see a Youtube video of someone swapping out a laptop drive with a larger SSD and they used exactly the process I tried - clone disk as the process seemed simple and I thought that was exactly what it was for.
John
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John, please see the following reference cloning and laptop / notebook PC's.
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.
John wrote:
Replacing the hard drive is exactly the plan, not sure when but when the existing spinning disk dies I guess. The reason I'm doing this is to insure me against failure of this laptop as it runs Windows 7 and some software that's irreplaceable!
Unless the software on the existing spinning disk never changes, then a Clone will be 'stuck' at the moment in time when it was created, missing all changes that occurred after that time.
If your notebook data is really that important, vital and valuable, please invest in a USB HDD backup drive of say 1TB size which are relatively inexpensive, then setup and make regular Disk backups of the SSD to that backup drive.
If / when the existing disk does die, you will have a more recent backup image that can be used to recover the failed disk to your new disk (SSD or HDD), where you would just need to install the new disk then boot from the Acronis Rescue Media to do the recovery.
Perhaps better still, schedule a time to replace the existing disk with the new SSD before it fails, then store the removed disk safely as an extra backup insurance, and realise the improved performance benefits of running the notebook from a larger SSD.
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Thank you Steve for the reply,
After the first failure to clone my spinning disk I had a hunch that a particular program that I never use might have been causing the issue, Rollback RX, so I uninstalled it and started over, this time it worked perfectly :)
I've considered all you comments an decided to leave it as is, there are no windows updates for Windows 7 and certaily no other software or software updates. A clone of the existing spinning disk will suit me fine.
Thanks for your help.
John
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