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Destination Drive Is Greyed Out

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Hi Folks:

I just purchased Acronis True Image for the purpose of cloning my 256 Gb C drive to a larger 2 Tb drive. In the disk cloning dialogue I can select my C drive without any problems. When I try to select the Destination drive, it shows up in the list but is greyed out. At the moment I have the 2 Tb destination disk installed in a second NVMe bay in the computer. Any ideas as to why I can't select this drive?

-thanks, Mark

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Mark, welcome to the Acronis user forums.

While I have successfully clone OS disk within Windows, sometimes things can go wrong, so I prefer to do so using the Recovery Media.

Also, make sure you make a backup of the drive before attempting a clone. While cloning usually works without issues, many of us prefer to make a backup and recover the backup to the new drive.

Once the "clone" is finished, either remove the old drive or delete all partitions on the drive, to prevent Windows Boot Manager (which is used when booting UEFI systems - M.2 drives only work with UEFI, they do not work with BIOS/legacy configurations).

Not sure why you cannot select the destination drive; although this has been known to happen when the destination drive contains an OS partition.

You could try using the Add drive tool (under Tools > Additional tools), but as ATI is seeing the SSD I doubt it will make any difference.

One of the other MVPs, or some other user, may have an idea how to solve the problem.

Ian

Thanks for the info Ian. The Destination drive is brand new and newly formatted, so no partitions. I tried the Add Drive tool, but the same result: the disk is seen but greyed out. ATI also un-formatted the new drive for me and it wasn't showing up in Windows Explorer anymore. I had to reformat the drive and now Windows can see it again. I've opened a ticket with Acronis support; maybe they can suggest a solution.

Could I be having this problem because it's installed internally on the same RAID bus? I also ordered an OWC Express 4M2 which I will be using as an external drive enclosure but at the moment is empty. I'll try putting the 2 Tb drive in this and see ATI can see it.

I've heard great reports about Acronis True Image but so far it hasn't done a single task I need it to do.

-thanks, Mark

Being on the same controller would not be a problem.

It is possible that the problem could be specific to the particular brand/model of M.2 dive. Not a brand I am familiar with. Dim recollection Acronis does not play nicely with some brands/models but not sure that should happen.

Not clear I’d you tried it with the new drive unpartitioned - if not you should do so.

Ian

I would recommend not using cloning at all for this scenario, especially with RAID involved etc.

Create and test the Acronis Rescue Media (with the 'Simple' option) to ensure that this is able to see all of your drives.

Identify the BIOS mode being used by your Windows OS by using the msinfo32 command in Windows - look in the right panel of the report where this should be UEFI for most NVMe M.2 type drives.

Make a full disk backup of the current working 256GB SSD to another drive (not the intended new SSD.

Check that the full backup was successful!

Shutdown the PC, remove the working 256GB SSD and replace it by your intended new SSD using the exact same NVMe slot.

Boot the PC using the Acronis Rescue Media in the correct BIOS mode as identified above, with the second drive containing your full disk backup connected.

Restore the disk image to the new SSD.

See forum topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I documented the process that I used when upgrading my laptop NVMe SSD drive using Backup & Restore.

Note: the new target NVMe SSD should be prepared from the rescue media using the Tools > Add new disk and selecting the same partition scheme as used by the original SSD, i.e. if UEFI boot as GPT partition scheme.

Hi Steve:

 Thanks for the detailed list; I'll try it out tonight. I'm not currently running any RAID system-that's just the listed interface that all 3 internal drives are connected to.

-Mark

So I followed Steve's instructions to the letter but still no progress. Even under Disk Recovery the Aura P12 2 Tb as a Destination is still greyed out (see attached picture taken with my cell).

A fellow Dell user suggested Macrium Reflect on this thread: 15 R4, upgrading to 2TB C drive - Dell Community  It was also suggested that because the new SSD uses a RAID infrastructure that it would be seen as an external drive only. In the screenshot attached to my first post all 3 internal drives are on the same RAID controller, and work fine.

I'll try it out Macrium Reflect and report back.

-Mark

 

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After days of trying, I have figured this out. In no way shape or form will Acronis "any version" restore an image to a smaller size drive, than the drive the image was created from. Yes, you can go in and manually set your parameters for each partition, and do a sector by sector restore, which could take hours or possibly days depending on the size of the drive. You can't clone from an image, "hopefully we all know that" so if you have and image you're trying to restore, and the destination drive is grayed out, you're out of luck. If your destination drive is the same size or larger, than the drive that created the image, you can highlight that drive and restore it. These are the facts! if you can restore and image to a smaller size drive, than the one it was created from, please show us how. So what I did was, clone the larger drive 500 gig that had 80 gig of used space, to a 120 gig drive using EaseUS, and laid out that image with Acronis, and was able to restore, of course to any drive 120 gig or larger, So, what I found out was, it’s all about drive size with Acronis.