DD12 basic question on laptop HDD cloning

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Comments: 2

I have a laptop with win 8.1x64, secure boot, UEFI, and a GPT SSD.

In the past to clone a laptop drive, I would remove the drive, take it to my desktop with DD11 and 2 eSATA ports. I would attach the old laptop HDD and a new target drive to the desktop, use DD11 to clone it. (I have not yet upgraded my copy of DD11.)

This approach never gave me any trouble, The clones would work without problems in the laptop, but this was only with Win7 and older versions of Windows and older laptops without UEFI, GPT, secure boot.

My question is, in theory, should DD12 on a desktop be able to create a working clone of a drive from a laptop with win 8.1x64, secure boot, UEFI, and a GPT SSD?

The reason for the question is that in the True Image world it seems to be important that the target drive be mounted in the laptop for cloning. http://kb.acronis.com/content/2931

The only explanation that I found is in the 5th reply in this thread http://forum.acronis.com/forum/37545. Not sure if this same concern would apply using DD.

Wed, 09/10/2014 - 18:23
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Comments: 61

Hey tex, not sure if you're still looking at this thread but here's my 2 cents on the topic.

The reason for needing to mount the target drive in the laptop for restoring/cloning is because if you attach it with a USB connection to the laptop, the laptop will assign a drive letter other than C: to that drive, because the primary internal drive is still associated with the C: drive and its still powered up in the laptop. The laptop will record the new drive serial number, etc. in the registry along with the drive letter it assigned to that drive over the USB port connection. Then when you swap the cloned drive back into the laptop and try to boot, the registry doesn't associate that drive serial number and drive letter as C: because its seen it before and assigned it a different drive letter, so it won't boot properly. You can fix that with a registry edit, but its best to avoid it in the first place.

Now using your method of cloning on another machine altogether, you also avoid that problem because when you place the cloned drive into the laptop main drive that's the first time the laptop has seen it, so it associates that drive with the C: drive, enters it into the registry, and boots normally.

So that explains one of your questions. Regarding the question about UEFI, GPT, etc. as long as you do a full clone of the entire drive you should have the same partition info, and everything else from the original drive, so I would assume your method would work. Unfortunately I've never actually cloned a UEFI drive with DD12, so I can't say for sure. I think the main difference between UEFI/GPT and the older MBR partitions is a separate system boot partition in the UEFI system, and without that you won't boot properly. So for example with MBR you just need to restore the OS partition and the partition table and you're good. With UEFI you also need the system boot partition, but if you clone the entire drive completely, then you'll have that covered. Read up a little on the differences between UEFI and MBR drives and it should be clear to you.

Sat, 09/27/2014 - 05:34