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SSD Cloned to Standard Drive loses 7 drivers

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I have a 250 GB SSD in a Desktop computer, and it is too small. I have a 500 GB SSD in a laptop, and I do not need all that room. I have decided to swap the two drives. 

The following WAS my plan ... 1.) Clone the Desktop SSD (I'll call it drive #1) with another drive. Since I do not have another SSD for that use, I cloned it to a Standard Hard Drive. 2.) Replace drive #1 with the clone (drive #2), 3. Clone Drive #1 from the SSD in the Laptop (drive #3), and 4.) place drive #1 into the laptop and drive #3 into the desktop. 

If everything cloned perfectly, the two machines would act the same as they had before, but with the larger SSD in the Desktop and the smaller SSD in the laptop. 

But the cloned Standard Drive, when placed into the Desktop, was not perfect. 7 Drivers were either missing entirely or not working correctly. An error message indication that no sound card was even installed, and in the Driver Manager, I noticed two unknown devices and that the driver or drivers for the Quad CPU were either missing or corrupted. 

I attempted the first clone again, this time with a different standard Hard Drive ... no change, same problem, same drivers not working, missing, or corrupted. All these drivers work properly when I replace the original SSD back in the machine. 

So I never got past the first clone and I'm now back where I started. 

So I wonder why this happened? Can I not clone a standard drive from an SSD? Am I doomed to having to purchase another 500 GB SSD at (about) $150? 

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Russell, welcome to these User Forums.

Please can you describe how you have been doing this clone action?

Was this doing a Live Clone from within an active Windows OS using ATI 2018?

Was this by booting from the Acronis Rescue Media to do an offline clone?

How was the target drive connected to the computer where you were doing the clone?

If using the Rescue Media, which type of media have you created?

If you clone from dissimilar hardware the effect on drivers for the hardware will be as you describe.  The clone tool is designed to make an exact copy of one drive to another so the laptop you have would have to be almost identical to your desktop hardware wise for all the drivers to work.  Very unlikely.

I was using a "Rescue Disk" on a CD. I also had a Rescue Disk on a Flash Drive, but, for some unknown reason, the computer would not boot from it, even when the BIOS was set for it to be the primary boot device. 

 

And please note that the cloned drive was placed back into the machine that formerly held the source drive, so the only change in hardware was the hard drives themselves. The "Standard" Hard Drive was to replace the SSD until I had the opportunity to clone the Standard to the larger SSD. Unfortunately, I was unable to get any further because of the driver problem. 

Russell, there are 3 different flavours of the Rescue Media that can be created - one uses Linux as the boot OS, the other two use variations of Windows PE (one taken from the Windows Recovery Environment, the other requiring the Windows ADK to be installed).

If your computer has a Legacy BIOS then there shouldn't be any issue with booting any of the rescue media types, but if it has UEFI BIOS with Secure Boot enabled by default, then it may not boot some of the rescue media depending on how strict the Secure Boot is enforced.

I have been dealing with an Acer laptop which refused to boot from the ATI 2018 WinPE media until I turned of Secure Boot (which could only be changed after setting a Supervisor password in the BIOS).

Another aspect here is what is included on your Rescue Media, where some users have reported Acronis Universal Restore being invoked for a clone or recovery operation, which has changed device drivers in the process.  AUR may be invoked if there is different hardware being used to connect the target drive that requires different drivers other than normal plug & play.

Your procedure in cloning (3. Clone Drive #1 from the SSD in the Laptop (drive #3), and 4.) place drive #1 into the laptop and drive #3 into the desktop.) indicates that you used a cloned copy drive from your laptop in your desktop.  Different hardware.  If you are using Windows 10 here, then because of the change in hardware between machines, Windows itself will use generic drivers to boot the cloned drive.

It really makes no difference, simply visit your manufacturers support sites, download the latest drivers for your computers, and use Windows Device Manager to install them.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

I have now upgraded my version of True Image 2018 to the latest version and am installing ADK. After installation, I shall try again and see what happens. 

 

Fun, fun, fun (until daddy takes the T-Bird away)

The download of ADT takes a really long time (my ISP provides a maximum of 7 MB/s) and the installation of ADK is excruciatingly slow, but I got it done, placed the iso on a cd, booted, and attempted to clone the ssd on a standard hard drive.

 

I booted the standard drive when it was through and checked the Device Manager. This time, only two drivers were not working properly (with yellow triangles with an exclamation mark !), both listed as "Other Drivers" and both named "Logitech Cordless Device". Interestingly enough, I only have one Logitech Cordless Device attached, a wireless Mouse, and it seems to be working properly.

 

I then ran "Scan Booster" and it found no drivers to update or add.  

 

I think I will await your comments before I clone the laptop SSD onto the SSD taken out of the Desktop. 

I decided to check Logitech Support for downloads for my mouse, the M560, and found one called "Set Point", version 6.63.83_64. I downloaded it, executed it, and all the Driver Manager came up clean. 

 

I think I'm safe to take the former Desktop SSD and cloning my laptop SSD to it, installing the former SSD to the laptop, and cloning the former laptop SSD with the Standard Hard Drive now in the Desktop. 

 

Here goes! 

Hooray ... I was able to complete the conversion and I now have the bigger SSD (500 GB Samsung) in the Desktop, and the smaller SSD (250 GB SanDisk) in the laptop. The desktop has over 200 GB of files and the smaller drive was almost filled. The smaller drive in the desktop works just fine. 

Good to hear that your migration has been successful, thanks for the feedback.