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Clone Surface Laptop Studio: boot question

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Hi!

I have a Surface Laptop Studio and I want to be able to clone my internal NVMe disk to a 3.5 SATA HDD and if my NVMe disk stop working I want to be able to use my 3.5 SATA HDD and clone it to a new NVMe disk that I will put inside the laptop. How can I be sure that my clone with Acronis is going to make the clone so that it will boot up Windows without a problem? I do not want to open up my laptop before the NVMe failes so I can´t try it at the moment.

I did try to clone it to my 3.5 SATA HDD and choose To replace a disk on this machine during the clone, I then tried to boot it from USB but it just want to do a startup repair. I guess that is because Acronis is making the clone for an internal NVMe with that drivers? So if I then would clone my 3.5 SATA HDD to a brand new NVMe and then replace my current NVMe in the laptop would Windows then boot up?

0 Users found this helpful

Freddy, welcome to these public User Forums.

Microsoft will prevent Windows from booting from your external USB SATA HDD regardless of the success of your clone operation.

Next, cloning laptop drives has additional considerations that normally require that the target clone drive is installed inside the laptop and the original drive connected externally via USB which wouldn't work unless your laptop supports installing the 3.5" SATA HDD which is very unlikely!

The best solution here is to forget about using cloning and use Backup instead - this will allow you to schedule regular backup operations and keep the backup up to data and avoid any data loss.  If you need to replace the internal NVMe drive, then you would use Acronis rescue media to boot the laptop and recover the most recent backup image to the new drive.

Thank you for your replay!

My data files is not the biggest problem for me, but to install my programs and go thru the settings of Windows and all my applications again is a nightmare. If my disk stops working and I need to replace it I just want to recover my backup Windows from another disk. How about the Windows built in backup and restore, would that help me in this case, creating a system image backup? and then restore it with a new disk once the one I use now fails?

Freddy, the core purpose of backup applications like Acronis and many other competitors is to help simplify the process of recovering whole disk drives in the event of either a failed Windows update or a dying disk drive, so that users don't need to start again from scratch.

You could use the Windows (7) built in backup feature to create a system image but this can be cumbersome and difficult to use for recovery (in my experience).

Acronis allows you to perform regular scheduled backups to a choice of different destination locations (local / network or remote such as Acronis Cloud) and couples this with the ability to create advanced Windows PE bootable rescue media to use when recovery is needed.

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