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New Build Cloning

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I have viewed the 56637 video on Restoring to Dissimilar Hardware. My present system contains one 256 GB SSD for my Win 7 OS. I also have a 1tb HDD which is a cloned copy of my old Win 7 system as well as all of my programs and files.

I want to clone each SSD and HDD to my new build. Is there a specific order or way of accomplishing the restoring of the two drives to the new build that isn't addressed in the video?

Any help is appreciated.

 

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Bentryin, can you provide a link to where the video you are referring to can be found as I have not found this so have no reference to see what you are seeing here.

Also, can you clarify your system please.  If I understand you have a Win 7 system with a 256GB SSD drive, but you also have a separate 1TB HDD from a different Win 7 system.

What exactly are you trying to achieve in the end by cloning here?

It sounds as if you want to have a new build system that has both the 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD drives in but both of these drives each has a different copy of an installed Win 7 OS from different source computers?

I would suggest starting with the simplest approach and start by building just one of these Win 7 systems on to the new build hardware.  I assume from your use of cloning as the method to move these systems, that you have new SSD or HDD drives in the new build to which you will clone the original source drive?

 

Here is the link you requested, Steve... https://kb.acronis.com/ati2016/aur

You understand me correctly, except that I will be installing a 500GB SSD in the new sytem for my programs and files instead of the 1TB HDD which I currently have in my old build. I will still have plenty of capacity on the 500GB SSD.

I basically want everything I have on my old system cloned to my new build. The video indicates a clone to a dissimilar hardware build of only one drive.

On my current system I have the Old Win 7 with a partition,"storage", which contains my files and programs.

I would like to just transfer the storage partition over without the Old Win 7 but I am concerned there may be applications in the Old 7 which are needed by the programs in my storage partition. That and Acronis says I'm not able to clone just partitions.

I have a basic understanding of what I'm supposed to do but am being cautious by posting this request in case I'm overlooking something.

 

 

OK, thanks for the clarification, that helps a lot to understand what you are trying to do here.

First we need to look at what cloning is - this would help you in terms of moving your installed Windows 7 system with all programs and files from your 250GB SSD to the new 500GB SSD drive but cloning is not intended to be used to move the target drive to new hardware, so we need to forget about doing cloning at this point if the 500GB drive is not going to be installed in your older system.

Next, the process of Restoring your system to dissimilar hardware makes an initial assumption that you have first created an 'entire PC' or full disk backup image of the source system you are later going to restore.

This is fairly straight-forward to do for a single SSD drive, i.e. to move your Windows 7 installation from your 250GB SSD to the new 500GB SSD in the new build system.  You create a backup image of the 250GB SSD then restore this to the 500GB SSD installed in the new build system via an external drive.  Once you have done the restore, you then boot the new build system from the Universal Restore media (CD or USB stick) and use that to update the restored Windows 7 installation with all the additional hardware device drivers needed for the new build system (that didn't exist in the original source system).

Now for the difficult part - you cannot use Acronis to restore or migrate programs between Windows installations, i.e. you cannot take programs that are installed in the Windows 7 installation on the 1TB HDD drive and migrate these to the new build Windows 7 system you have restored from your 250GB SSD (from a different Windows 7 installation).

You can 'move' the separate 'Storage' partition from the 1TB HDD drive, assuming that you have not let the Acronis restore from the 250GB SSD do an automatic resize of the partitions from that smaller drive and therefore not leave any free space on the 500GB drive.  You will need sufficient unallocated / free space on the 500GB SSD drive in the new build system to restore the 'Storage' partition to plus obviously, you will need to make a backup image of that partition to use for this restore operation.

If you are restoring Windows programs within the Storage partition then you will need to reinstall these again unless they can run in a stand-alone mode without needing any DLL's or Registry entries etc that are in the Windows System folders.  There is no method of merging the programs from two different Windows 7 installations using the Acronis True Image product, nor using Universal Restore.

Please also see KB document:

19296: Acronis Products Cannot Be Used to Transfer Applications to Different System or Upgrade OS

Created - February 28, 2011; Updated - August 20, 2015;

Acronis products are a backup and recovery solution for restoring disks/partitions or files/folders

This article applies to:

  • All Acronis backup software

Sorry, Steve, I left out one important factor. I will also have a 250GB SSD dedicated for the OS in the new build  as I now do in my current system.

Will that make things doable?

Bentryin, the new 250GB SSD in the new build will make the transition from the old 250GB SSD a simpler matter but you will still need to restore an image from the old drive to the new one in the new build, then run Universal Restore to add in the additional device drivers for the new hardware components.

You could try restoring an image of the 1TB HDD to the new build 500GB SSD as the second drive in the new build but unless you are going to try to use this in a dual-boot scenario, then any programs / applications installed on that 500GB SSD drive will not be usable.  To use the 500GB SSD as a dual-boot drive would again require using Universal Restore with no guarantee that this would succeed without some changes being needed to the system Boot Configuration Data store.

A further complication in all this discussion is the issue of Windows Activation.  Unless you have a full retail version of Windows 7 you cannot just transfer the OS from one computer to another.  OEM versions of Windows are restricted to being activated on one system only based on the hardware signature of that system (motherboard, CPU, NIC etc).

 

Thanks, Steve. Your last point of Win 7 full version simplified my decision of cloning the OS. I have an OEM. So much for that! I will try the Old 7 clone though.

Thanks for your help!