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Black screen after starting drive copy

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Hey there all,

So I just started copying my internal nvme drive to an external nvme drive, and once I restarted to begin the process my computer went into a black screen and is still there 10 minutes later. I just want to confirm if this is normal or not. The computer is a Lenovo Flex 5 Laptop. 

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David, welcome to these public User Forums.

Sorry but what you are doing is unlikely to work for various reasons!

The first reason is that cloning laptop drives to external targets can result in a non-booting drive.

The second is that the restart to perform the clone operation uses a temporary Linux based environment that most likely does not have support for your NVMe SSD and won't 'see' it as being present.

Cloning for laptops should be performed from bootable Acronis media with the new drive installed inside the laptop and the original drive connected externally via USB.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

See forum topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I have documented (with images) the process that I have used multiple times for my own laptops using Backup & Recovery.