Cloning fails to see or lock disk
On a Windows 10 laptop that boots off a 1 TB 3.5" SATA HDD I added a new M.2 PCIe 250 GB disk and was able to format it and create a document. I would like to clone the old disk and so on a tower PC running ATI 2019 I created an ISO recovery file called AcronisBootablePEMedia and used Rufus to create a UEFI bootable pen drive from which I booted the laptop. When I attempt a clone I get the message:
"Unable to lock the disk. Boot your computer from a Linux-basedbootable media, and then try again."
So I went back to the tower running ATI 2019 and created recue media AcronisBootableMedia.ISO which I wrote to my USB pen drive and booted from. I tried to clone again and now get the message:
"Unable to continue. This utility is designed to work with two or more disk drives."
Any help in understanding what I have done wrong would be appreciated.


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That's helpful, thanks. I did not appreciate that there was a difference between having the source disk connected via SATA and removing it to load in a USB caddy. Actually I still don't really understand why this should be the case but never mind.
The next challenge will be to enable a dual boot arrangement, at least temporarily, so I shall be trying to understand BCDEDIT for that.
Thanks again Steve.
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Eugene, you don't need to setup or enable dual-boot for this scenario, just to boot your laptop from Acronis Rescue Media on either a USB stick or DVD along with have the original HDD connected externally via a USB adapter.
You will not be booting from the HDD when connected externally, just using it as the Source for the Clone operation.
My personal preference is to not use cloning but rather to use Backup & Recovery which doesn't need the original HDD to be connected at all but set aside safe away from any changes etc.
With Acronis, you can create a Survival Kit external boot & storage drive where you can store a backup image of the HDD, then boot from that drive with the new NVMe M.2 SSD installed for the recovery operation as per my earlier link where I did this for my own HP Omen laptop.
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