Unable to clone Hard drive to SSD please help
Hi everyone, I am completely hopeless with things like this but would really, really appreciate any help (I am not very tech savy). I purchased a new SSD drive a week or so ago with the aim of sparking some life back into my old HP Pavilion laptop and thought it looked fairly straight forward on the Acronis videos. Unfortunately I have been unsuccessful on two occasions at completing the clone and I can’t see where I am going wrong. The old hard drive is a 1.5tb drive of which less than 200gb has been used. The new drive is a crucial 480gb SSD.
On my first attempt I attempted the clone in windows using the automatic settings in Acronis, the drive gets to around 95% complete and then says something along the lines of clone failed see log for details. Unfortunately I am new to this and therefore I do not know where to find this log and even if I did I am not sure that I would know what these errors mean. After the failed clone attempt had finished my drive did not show up under ‘This PC’ but will still show up in the disk manager section see picture.
After watching a video online I decided to try the method of creating a bootable media and holding shift and restarting the laptop, this eventually brought me back to Acronis but when I try to clone the drive in this menu I receive the error Acronis unable to lock disk, boot your computer from a linux based bootable device. This will then let me go to the next stage after this error message but I am not sure that it is safe to proceed. If anybody could help me with this it would be greatly appreciated.
The other thing that I have noticed is that when Acronis shows me what it intends to clone, it does not show the hp recovery partition I am not sure if this is normal or if I just need to copy this to a USB stick too?
Hi Steve, thank you so much for your really prompt response, Amazing!
I am currently backing up my old files as you suggested, thank you for the advice. My next questions is, before installing the new SSD with the failed clone on it, do I need to reformat the SSD or will Acronis automatically do this when I attempt the clone?
The next question that I had is to do with the bootable media creation, when I attempted the clone in the restart menu holding the shift key it said that I needed to use Linux based bootable media, will I have this message again or should I just ignore this and create the WinRE-based media when the new SSD is inside?
Thanks for all of your help so far it is greatly appreciated!
Jonathan, my own preference would be to initialise the new SSD to start again with a clean slate, though Acronis will wipe the SSD as the first action but could throw another wobble if it thinks it has encountered another copy of the OS.
To do the initialisation, use the Acronis > Tools > Add new disk option with the new SSD either attached via USB externally, or if booted from the Acronis rescue media with the SSD installed in place of the original HDD.
Note: you need to identify the BIOS mode of the existing HDD drive and initialise the SSD to use the same. In Windows, type the command: msinfo32 and look for BIOS mode in the right panel information. This will be either UEFI for newer GPT systems, or else Legacy or the HDD make / model for older systems using MBR.
The add new disk tool will ask you to choose either GPT or MBR for the new SSD.
If you follow the instructions for laptops, then the new SSD (blank / initialised only) should be installed inside the laptop, and you should be booting the rescue media from a power off state where there should be no issues with the disk being locked etc. The HDD should be connected via USB as an external drive if doing a clone from the HDD to the installed SSD.
If the laptop tries to boot from the external USB HDD drive instead of the rescue media, then power off again, then when powering on, keep pressing the ESC key on the HP laptop to bring up the BIOS menu. You should normally see F9 listed as the boot device menu, where you need to select the boot menu entry to match how the rescue media needs to be booted, i.e. the entry for the USB stick or DVD with UEFI shown for UEFI / GPT systems. KB 59877 referenced above has more detailed information on that aspect.
If you want to use the alternative method to Recover the full Disk backup of the HDD instead of using cloning, then again you just need to have the new SSD installed in the laptop, then boot the Acronis rescue media along with having your external backup drive connected (where the backup is stored).
KB 65539: Acronis True Image 2021: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media
I normally use Backup & Recovery for these types of migration on my own systems. The benefits are that the original, working HDD can be put in a cupboard safe from any errors, and the new SSD installed and recovered to from the backup image using rescue media.
Hi Steve thanks again, I have a couple of other questions if that's ok. I am a real novice so do not entirely understand the whole process but I am following the steps. When I backed up my Data should I have done this using Acronis as I just copied and pasted Windows C and Recovery D from 'This PC' or will this still be ok?
Do I need to/is it advisable to do a fresh install of the operating system and if so how do I go about doing this as I would like to do everything in the correct order.
Thank so much
Jonathan, you most definitely need to use a backup application if you want to be able to recover from backup data. Just copying / pasting your Windows C: drive etc will be missing masses of vital system files that cannot be copied in that way!
Please see my earlier post above with links to KB documents dealing with making backups.
You do not need to do a clean install of Windows if doing a restore / recovery from a valid backup image.
Hi Steve, thanks again. I have backed up and installed the new SSD. When I boot from the USB stick it opens Acronis but I still recieve the error Acronis unable to lock disk, boot your computer from a linux based bootable device. It then proceeds to the screen that I have attached a picture for but will not let me select the new SSD as the destination disk.
Jonathan, are you able to select the new SSD when in the rescue media, and if so, does it show as having any existing partitions on it?
If so, then try clicking on Tools > Add new disk and reinitialise the SSD to remove all partitions. Note: you need to select either GPT (if your PC boots using UEFI mode) or else MBR (if it is Legacy boot).
You may need to restart the PC again from the rescue media after doing the initialisation if you still see the disk locked error.
Steve, thank you so much for all of your help. The drive still said unable to lock disk but still proceeded to the next screen. The clone completed without any issues this time but when I went to restart my computer it would come up with an error message. I then removed my external hard drive and tried again and it started! The SSD has completely changed the old slow laptop and it has gone from taking several minutes to start up to being able to turn on and open a chrome tap within 10 seconds, amazing!
Thank you so much for your help, I couldn't have done it without you. I will keep the old hard drive in a draw just in case any problems come up in the future. One thing that I did notice is before I seemed to have two recovery (D:) drives and now it only shows one? My final question is, is it safe to ever plug my old hard drive in as an external drive to delete some old files etc in case I want to use the additional storage in the future or will this be an issue as it contains a duplicate of some of the old files?
Thanks
Jonathan, glad that you have a faster, working SSD in your laptop now! Well done!
Not sure about the Recovery partitions (drives) but if all is looking Ok, then wouldn't worry about it.
The key with your old drive is to not to attempt booting with that drive connected but it should be fine to connect it via USB after the laptop is at the Windows desktop, where you can either reformat the whole drive and use it for backup data etc, or keep it as an emergency spare and remove any unwanted files / data as needed.