Problems cloning SSD in Dell Inspiron 15 7570
Hi all,
Hoping someone here can help me successfully upgrade the SSD boot drive in my Inspiron 15 7570, as I'm running out of space.
Here's what I have:
- Samsung 970 EVOPlus NVMe 500GB SSD
- Acronis True Image 2020 (full version)
- NVMe USB Drive enclosure
- SATA USB-C Drive enclosure
Here's what I have tried:
1: mounted the new SSD into the NVMe enclosure and used Acronis to clone the internal SSD, then swapped the drives over. Result: BIOS couldn't find boot record.
2: created Acronis boot media, mounted the SATA SSD, that came installed in laptop, in the SATA enclosure, installed the NVMe SSD inside the laptop, booted to Acronis, got errors whilst cloning, and wouldn't boot from NVMe after ignoring errors.
I am not sure why method 1 didn't work, but found something on the Acronis website that said the destination drive needs to be installed in the laptop, and the source in external enclosure.
Method 2 seems to be something to do with BitLocker (does that seem right?)
So, what am I doing wrong?
How can I clone my existing boot drive to the new SSD and successfully get it to boot without issues?
So, I tried a couple of other things...
3. Found an article that said that an MBR can be rebuilt by booting to Windows 10 Recovery media, using the advanced options to get to a command prompt, and then running some commands. This gave me errors on a couple of of the commands (don't recall the exact wording but to the effect that it couldn't access the drive). So that didn't work.
4. Tried disabling BitLocker, then swapping over the drives, booting to the Acronis bootable media, and cloning the drive again. This time got not errors whilst cloning. But it still wouldn't boot into the new drive.
So, then, swapped the old drive back in, and re-enabled BitLocker. Unfortunately, when I then rebooted the machine (after waiting for BitLocker to re-encrypt the drives) I then got a blue screen and reboot into the Windows Recovery environment.
Fortunately, though, I had made a backup of the boot drive using Acronis, so I restored that, and am now back to having a working system. But still on the old SSD.
Anyway, going to read Steve's reply, above, now, and see if I can figure this thing out.
Steve Smith wrote:Scott, welcome to these public User Forums.
Your option 1 doesn't work because cloning a laptop drive to an external drive does not set the correct BCD configuration due to changes in hardware detected for the drive adapter.
Your option 2 should work and is the recommended method of doing this but if you do have BitLocker involved, that has to be disabled before using rescue media or else forget about using cloning here.
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.
The rescue media used here needs to be Windows PE media and also needs to be used in UEFI boot mode as required for NVMe M.2 support in Windows.
OK, yeah, I had already read those articles, and Acronis is booting in the right mode, because it can see the m.2 drive.
Steve Smith wrote:The approach I would recommend and also the safest approach is:
- If your NVMe SSD is a M.2 drive, then install this in the M.2 slot alongside your current SATA SSD. I would initialise the M.2 SSD first using your NVMe USB enclosure to avoid any boot errors! This will help Windows find new hardware and install any device drivers needed.
- Make a full Disk backup of your working SATA SSD to an external drive.
- Check the current BIOS mode used by Windows 10 by running the msinfo32 command in Windows then check the BIOS mode value shown on the right side.
- Create new ATI 2020 'Simple' WinPE rescue media to pick up device drivers from your Windows Recovery Environment.
- Shutdown the laptop, remove the SATA SSD, leaving only the NVMe SSD.
- Boot from the WinPE rescue media in UEFI mode with your backup drive connected.
- Recover your full backup from step 2. to the new NVMe SSD.
Note: use the Add new disk tool to prepare the NVMe SSD as GPT but leave it as 'unallocated' space. No partitions need to be created as will be wiped on recovery!When doing the restore of your backup, this needs to be done as a Disk & Partition restore and at the top Disk selection level.
Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.
Check the Log messages in the rescue media before exiting as these are lost otherwise on exit.
If all is OK, then remove the rescue media & external drive, then boot from the NVMe SSD.
Note: the BIOS should show 'Windows Boot Manager' as the boot priority device.Once Windows is working fine from the new SSD, then consider reformatting the old SATA SSD using your external enclosure then reinstalling to use a data drive.
See KB 63226: Acronis True Image 2020: how to create bootable media
KB 63295: Acronis True Image 2020: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media
OK, so regarding step 1 of your sequence, one issue I'm having is that my laptop only has a single m.2 slot, and the SATA SSD is an m.2 SATA device! So I can't have both installed in the laptop at the same time! Being able to have both installed would have made this whole process so much easier!
AH!!! Step 7 might be what I have been missing! So, I need to run that to make the NVMe SDD bootable first?
And, the recovery procedure is what I did to get back to a working system (see my previous comment in this thread). So that part is straight forward enough.
So, to see if I am understanding this correctly, what should work for me here is:
1. Swap out SATA SSD for the NVMe SSD.
2. Boot into Acronis bootable USB media.
3. Use Add New Drive on NVMe SSD.
4. Restore backup of SATA SSD to the NVMe SSD.
Is that correct?
Will Acronis account for the size difference, and/or allow me to specify partition sizes during restore?
So, to see if I am understanding this correctly, what should work for me here is:
1. Swap out SATA SSD for the NVMe SSD.
2. Boot into Acronis bootable USB media.
3. Use Add New Drive on NVMe SSD.
4. Restore backup of SATA SSD to the NVMe SSD.Is that correct?
Will Acronis account for the size difference, and/or allow me to specify partition sizes during restore?
Scott, yes the sequence is correct.
With regards to size differences, you haven't mentioned what the SATA SSD size is, only that the NVMe SSD is 500GB.
ATI should automatically resize the partitions from the source SSD to fit in the space available on the target drive but it can leave the sizes as they were at times when recovering to a larger target drive, but that is very easily addressed after all is finished and you are happy that all is looking ok!
To do the resize, download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software and use this to move the Windows Recovery partition to the end of free space on the drive, then expand the OS partition to use free space available.
Steve Smith wrote:So, to see if I am understanding this correctly, what should work for me here is:
1. Swap out SATA SSD for the NVMe SSD.
2. Boot into Acronis bootable USB media.
3. Use Add New Drive on NVMe SSD.
4. Restore backup of SATA SSD to the NVMe SSD.Is that correct?
Will Acronis account for the size difference, and/or allow me to specify partition sizes during restore?Scott, yes the sequence is correct.
With regards to size differences, you haven't mentioned what the SATA SSD size is, only that the NVMe SSD is 500GB.
Ah, apologies, I thought I had mentioned it. The SATA SSD is 250GB. Oh, looking back at my first post, I see I said "I'm running out of space", but didn't actually specify the size of that drive. My bad.
Steve Smith wrote:ATI should automatically resize the partitions from the source SSD to fit in the space available on the target drive but it can leave the sizes as they were at times when recovering to a larger target drive, but that is very easily addressed after all is finished and you are happy that all is looking ok!
To do the resize, download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software and use this to move the Windows Recovery partition to the end of free space on the drive, then expand the OS partition to use free space available.
Ok, thanks. I'll give it a go, and hopefully it will leave the various non-boot partitions as-is, and just resize the boot partition. If not, I'll take a look at that partition manager. Thanks again for your help, hopefully my next post will be to say it all worked! :)
Thank you!!!! It worked! Well, sort of.
Followed the procedure I derived from your previous post, Steve, and at first it didn't work.
I had to go into BIOS, select the SSD as the primary boot device, after which it booted into the recovery mode. From there I tried Startup Repair, which (I forget the exact phrasing), basically told me there was nothing wrong with startup.
So then I selected the option to change the UEFI configuration, which re-booted into the BIOS. From which I swapped the boot drive back to the Windows Boot Manager.
And that worked! So, downloaded the Partition management tool you suggested, moved and resized partitions, and it now seems to be working ok. Though there were a few odd things like missing Start Menu icons, but those seem to have resolved themselves.
One thing that is concerning me, is that the recovery partitions, on the restored drive, are now not showing up in the Volumes list within Disk Manager, and don't have "Healthy (Recovery Partition)".
Scott, there should normally only be a single WinRE recovery partition unless you have an OEM factory recovery partition or have a dual-boot system.
You can check the status of the WinRE partition by using the command REAGENTC /INFO from an Administrator window.
It's a Dell, so I believe it has a 'Support Assist' recovery partition, or two...
Here's what it looks like in Drive Manager now:
And, the results from REAGENTC /INFO:
Unfortunately I don't have a screen shot of how it looked before.
Scott, from my limited use of Dell Support Assist it has never caused any recovery partitions to be created.
I have just spent several days working on a Dell Latitude with a failing mSATA SSD where I used Support Assist to confirm the SSD failure. I now have it rebuilt using a new mSATA SSD after having to do a clean install of Win 10 and reinstall Support Assist etc - disk management shows as below:
This was a Legacy Win7 upgrade to Win 10 so is MBR not GPT and not using BitLocker. The unallocated space is from using Samsung Magician to set over-provisioning.
I found a photo I took at some point during the process of trying to get the cloning process to work.
Disk 1 is the old 250GB SATA SSD.
And, here's what's in the Acronis backup of that drive:
Scott, I don't have an answer for why Windows Disk Management doesn't show your other partitions as expected. I can only suggest trying doing a full shutdown and restart to see if that clears things?
One of the things I did with the Dell laptop I was working on is to get rid of an old / unwanted Dell factory recovery partition (similar to the 11GB one shown in your photo) as never want to put it back to Windows 7 back from around 5-6 years ago!
I have since migrated that laptop from MBR to GPT by doing a Backup in MBR, then booting the rescue media in UEFI mode and restoring back after using Add new disk to prepare the drive as GPT.
Update! I restarted the Dell laptop after making a new ATI backup and noticed that 2 of the partitions that should be hidden now had drive letters (G & H) allocated when I looked at disk management. I took the option to remove the G drive letter from the System Reserved partition which was actioned but then the WinRE partition disappeared from the top list and just shows the size in the lower panel!
Disk management wouldn't let me remove the H letter so had to use a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software to remove it, after which all showed as expected in disk management.
Hmm. OK. Well, thanks for your help.
I'm just concerned that I may not be able to recover my system if anything goes wrong.
And, yeah, rebooting was the first thing I tried when I noticed it.
Update:
Interestingly, the partitions look OK in DISKPART:
I mean, I don't know if any of that information is necessarily correct, but it kind of looks ok, I think?
At least it states they are healthy!
I figured it out!
The GPT attributes were incorrect. In the DISKPART info above you can see they all have "Attrib : 0000000000000000", but I noticed that the DISKPART script listed in the following article, uses a "gpt attribute" command on the Recovery partition with the value "0x8000000000000001":
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/configure-uefigpt-based-hard-drive-partitions
So, I went through selecting each of the recovery partitions, using gpt attribute to set the values on each one, and...
:D