First time trying to clone hdd to hybrid SSD
Hello
My name is Ed. I am running Acronis 2017. Here's what I am attempting to do
My Laptop is a Lenovo X220. It came with a 320GB HDD, and I have run out of space.
So upon some investigation, I purchases a Seagate Laptop SSHD 1000GB.
I created an Acronis boot disk on a USB drive, shut the machine down, installed the new Seagate drive in the laptop, and the original in an external shell.
I then configured the machine to boot from the USB, and had no problem getting to the Acronis screen.
That's when things stopped. I have tried every trick I know and even though there are 3 drives recognized (the USB, the original HDD, and the new SSHD), selecting the source and target results in nothing happening.
So now I reinstalled the original HDD. Windows 7 loaded fine, and I installed the Seagate SSHD into the external shell. Thinking maybe it needed to be formatted, I did a quick NTFS format of the drive.
Then, just for kicks, I tried doing the cloning with the original drive in the laptop and the new drive in the external shell, and it fails. I attached teh Acronis System Report report which candidly goes over my head.
Thank you in advance, and hopefully this is just a dumb mistake.
Ed C
Edward...welcome to these user forums.
Since your computer is a laptop and Acronis Boot media does not support hybrid drives, you will need some additional hardware items to complete your task. To complete the backup of your current HDD, you will need an external HDD. Then after the backup is complete, you will need to attach the hybrid drive and the USB drive to your laptop simultaneously. The easiest way to do this is a USB docking station such as Kingwin EZ dock 3.
https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-2-5-Inch-3-5-Inch-Clone-EZD-2537U3/dp/B0…
The EZ dock 3 can handle 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch drives and handle 2 drives simultaneously.
Another advantage of the dock suggested by FtrPilot (as well as other similar dual bay cloning docks) - is they can clone your SATA drives on their own and you don't even need a PC to do it! I really like the having an offline dual bay clone dock - very convenient at times for cloning. It also serves as a dual bay external USB enclosure for either 1 or 2 drives at a time (when attached to a PC). Last but not least, most of these also have a Wipe feature too, so you can securely wipe/erase your drives (1 or 2 at at a time) similar to the offline clone process. For about $30, well worth the investment to have the diversity and features that these provide, which make a great addition and secondary solution to supplement a wonder backup/recovery application like Acronis True Image Home.
There are a couple of limitations with using the clone feature of these docks too:
1) When cloning offline with the docks, the new drive must be the same size (or bigger) than the original - the new drive can never be smaller with a hardware cloning solution
2) These cloning docks only support the standard SATA Interface (for most people this is exactly what you need though) So, if you have a newer m.2 SATA hard drive (m.2 is just a form factor), you'd need an addtional adapter so it can fit in the dock. If you have a newer m.2 NVME PCIE hard drive, there is no such adapter that converts the NVME PCIE to the SATA interface, so these docks currently aren't an option with m.2 NVME PCIE hard drives.
3) They aren't automated and
4) They don't offer a backup solution
5) They require that you physically take out drives - perhaps not possible with some laptop or tablet systems.