Skip to main content

Cloning disks to swap two drives

Thread solved

So I have an old XPS laptop with a Samsung Evo 840 SSD 500gb in it. I also have a small 12" Thinkpad X230 with a 240gb Adata su630 SSD.The old XPS needs refurbishment, to ideally make it a media server, but I really currently want the X230 as a chuckaroundable work machine when I'm visiting clients (got it cheaply on Ebay, so I don't have to take my newer expensive laptop). What I ideally want to do is to swap the drives between the two machines, as the Evo 840 is a lot better. But I want the OS and everything on it to stay the same for each machine (Win10 Pro on the X230 and Win10 Home on the XPS). Can I use Acronis Clone disk to do this? Plus note that while the Windows key is on the bottom of the XPS laptop, I cannot find the Windows key on the X230 anywhere. If things go wrong, how do I go about resetting the X230 back to it's original state?

0 Users found this helpful

Darren, you cannot use Cloning to do what you are asking here as to do so would lose one of your copies of Windows 10 on one of the drives in making a clone from the other.

The best approach to adopt will take a little longer but should be safer!

You will need a third drive to store backups from each of the two laptops on.

Connect the backup drive via USB to each laptop in turn and make a full Disk & Partitions backup of the current internal drive in each one, storing the backup image on the backup drive using either different folders for each laptop, or clear names to identify which is which!

Next, check each laptop to identify the BIOS boot mode used by each to boot into Windows 10.  To do this, run the command msinfo32 within Windows and look at the BIOS mode setting shown in the right panel output.  This will show either Legacy (for older boxes) or UEFI for newer ones!  This is IMPORTANT as this determines how the backups made earlier will be used.

Now, you need to create the Acronis bootable Rescue Media on one of the laptops using the tool provided with the ATI application.  I would recommend creating this on a USB stick (2GB min size, 32GB max) in preference to using a CD or DVD disc.

Once the boot media is created, then you need to be able to boot both laptops using this but doing so using the same BIOS boot mode identified earlier from msinfo32.

After confirming that you can do all of the above without issue, then you should be ready to shutdown both laptops and swap over the two drives.

Note: do not attempt to boot with the swapped drives until after you have restored the backups created earlier on the backup drive to them!

Select one laptop, then boot from the Acronis rescue media with the backup drive attached using the correct boot mode for that laptop.

Recover the backup from the external drive to the swapped internal drive, then shutdown the laptop again.  Disconnect the USB media and backup drive, then test that the laptop will boot correctly.

Note: you may need to change the BIOS boot device settings - so check this too with the original drives still in place, so that you know what the working settings are.  Take a photo of the settings if easier.

For Legacy BIOS boot, the boot device is the physical drive name.
For UEFI BIOS boot, the boot device is 'Windows Boot Manager' from the drive.

See the following reference documents.

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 61632: Acronis True Image 2019: how to create bootable media - for details of the 3 different types of rescue media.  Default Simple mode uses Windows Recovery Environment, then Advanced mode offers the older Linux media or Windows PE (using the Windows ADK).

KB 61621: Acronis True Image 2019: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

When doing the restore of your backup, this needs to be done as a Disk & Partition restore and at the top Disk selection level.

Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.

Once, you have the first laptop up and working, then repeat the steps for the second one.

Thanks for the info. Looks pretty comprehensive. Yeah, I thought would need 3rd drive, but didn't know could put 2 on one drive (thought needed 4th drive).

Only question then is if things go wrong, and I need to restore to the original drive, would it be a problem if I don't have the windows licence key? I can't see the sticker on the x230 (eBay purchase). Or if the x230 detects new hardware with the SSD will it demand the key?

Darren, if both of your laptops are currently licensed & activated for Windows 10, then just swapping over the drives will not break that activation or license provided you keep to the same edition that was licensed for each laptop.  Edition = Home, Pro, Enterprise etc.

The only other option here would be to just buy new, better, faster SSD drives for each laptop and backup / recover from each to the new drives, leaving the old drives as they are & untouched as an easy immediate backup method to get back to square one.

Dealing with the product key can be difficult if you don't know the origins of the license. Since you bought the X230 on eBay, it might not be so easy to determine. Here are a couple links to check out. It may be that all is OK.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12440/windows-10-activate

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10749/windows-10-find-product-key

Just to say I followed Steve's advice and it pretty much worked. There was a couple of problems, esp with the hardware (Dell laptops are the worst at getting to anything), but got there in the end.

While the bigger drive was no issue whatsoever (software or hardware; ThinkPads are pretty good), the smaller drive was a problem. Acronis rescue media just wouldn't allow me to select the smaller drive to restore to, even though the uncompressed data size was a lot smaller than the smaller drive could handle. I tried the Windows version of the rescue media as well as the Linux version, but neither worked. I tried selecting just the main drive partition (C:), and looked to resize it, but it wouldn't work.

In the end I had all my old stuff backed up or used on my main PC, so I just booted up the Dell, and reactivated with the correct Windows key, then unlinked any specific apps from the Dell that would cause overlap with the ThinkPad. Worked fine.

Note I upgraded to ATI 2020 (from 2018) for all of this.

Thanks for the help Steve!

Ps. Turns out they were both Win10 Pro. Totally forgot I had upgraded the old one from Win8 to Win8 Pro back in the day. Don't know if that made things easier.

Darren, glad to read that you got through all of this migration despite some of the niggles along the way.  Thank you for sharing your feedback.