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Cloning a laptop SSD with bitlocker

Thread needs solution

I want to upgrade the SSD in my laptop so its cloning time.

There are some special considerations. 

  1. The drive is an SSD not an HDD.  The howto note in the docs only mention HDDs.  Does this matter?  I'm guessing no.
  2. The boot partition is bitlocker encrypted.  I'm thinking that this might matter a lot.  Do I have to turn off bitlocker before cloning?
  3. There was something in the notes about cloning to the effect that both drives needed the same interface.  This might be a problem.  Both drives are PCIe M.32 interfaces but the external one will need to be connected via a USB adapter.  Will this make any difference?

 

 

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Henry, welcome to these public User Forums.

BitLocker will be an issue if you are attempting to clone your laptop from Acronis bootable rescue media, as it needs to be unlocked before cloning could work.

For laptop drives, then the recommendation is to always have the clone target drive installed inside the laptop which then requires using the rescue media to boot the laptop.

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.

See forum topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I have documented (with images) the process that I have used multiple times for my own laptops using Backup & Recovery. 

Note: I do not have BitLocker enabled on my own laptop but if you make the Backup using the Acronis GUI app in Windows, then the backup image does not have BitLocker enabled, so can be restored to the new M.2 SSD with no issues, then BitLocker re-enabled again.