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Clone from PC/laptop to Microsoft Surface

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Hello, I wanna ask about Acronis's ability to clone from a PC/Laptop to Ms. Surface, does it work? Please let me know. Thank you -stan

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Stan, welcome to these public User Forums.

What exactly are you asking here?

Cloning is the process of copying the contents of one disk drive to another disk drive, such that you end up with two identical drives (in terms of content).

Acronis True Image does not provide any method of cloning from one PC to a second PC (in the Windows version).

You can't clone a laptop/PC to a surface Pro.  And as Steve mentioned, cloning doesn't work from PC to PC, it's hard drive to hard drive so you would need to take out the source drive and attach to the Surface Pro via an external USB to SATA adapter.  But, you're better off taking a backup of the original PC and the Surface Pro as well (just in case) and restoring the backup image to the Surface instead of trying to clone.  

1) Surface Pro's have secure boot and bitlocker enabled by default - bios is not the most friendly, but you can modify it to allow booting from external media to restore an image of another machine

2) the OS of the source backup needs to be exactly the same as the one of the surface Pro (let's assume they are both Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro - you can't mix home with Pro or vice versa, nor could you restore an OEM version of Windows 7,8 or 8.1 to a system that cam with Windows 10... nor Windows 10 to a system that only has Windows 7,8 or 8.1.  Basically it needs to be the same or you won't be able to activate the license

3) Surface Pro has dedicated drivers and firmware.  Windows 10 is really good with out of the box drivers and Windows 10 should have the majority of surface pro drivers already built in. It should allow you to take a previous OS install (win 10) and restore to surface pro and work - without even needing to run Universal Restore (which usually isn't needed for Windows 10)

4) your previous OS backup should be the same.. assuming it is a 64-bit OS and UEFI/GPT install since that is likely what your Surface Pro came with

5) there is one instance on the Surface Pro that might get some people.  The 1TB version is actually 2 x 512GB PCIe NVME dries in RAID 1.  So, your restored OS needs to have the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) drivers to support that configuration on the 1TB Surface Pros to access the full 1TB as a single disk.  You rescue media would need this driver as well to identify the RAID as a single disk instead of 2 separate disks as well.

So yes, it's possible.  We used to restore our office Windows 10 to all new PC's that came through (Surface Pro's, Dells, laptops, desktops, etc.)  It really depends on what your base image to restore is though.  

Take a backup of the Surface Pro too, before you do anything.  Worse case, you restore what you have now and try again if the other restore doesn't work out as expected until you figure out the differences that you might need to overcome.

Thank you Steve and Bobbo for the welcome and answer.

I previously cloned a Windows 10 Intel laptop to an AMD pc, it works just fine since all I need to do was just plugging the new cloned HDD from the laptop to the PC. Now with Surface I'll have to do Image path since Surface use internal storage right? No experience yet, but I want to make sure it is going to work before purchasing a license for the Surface. Now I know it works, so thanks again.

sincerely,

-stan

 

Hi Cornelius, yeah, Microsoft doesn't want you messing with the memory or hard drive in the Surface Pro.  You shouldn't attempt to remove or upgrade either on your own or you may void your warranty and/or end up with a brick.

But, technically, you could still attache the source drive to it externally via USB to SATA adapter.  Surface are bit more complicated than other computers to clone and/or restore a backup, but both are possible.  You just have to get the bios configured correctly to allow for the external boot medium... 

Always be sure to take a backup of both the source and destination disks in this case.  And be sure to check that you can see the backup data in the backup image of both... secure boot and/or bitlocker can ruin your day if take an offline backup of a bitlocker encrypted drive and are hoping to restore it - probably won't work.  You either have to take the image from the live OS first, or completely disable bitlocker (which may not be fully active on the Surface, but still in a "locked" situation".  You can check the full status of bitlocker on a system using one of these commands:

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/check-bitlocker-drive-encryption-status

instead of relying on the default Bitlocker GUI in Windows.

FYI, you have 30 days to return Acronis software if you are not happy with it.  However, of course, you want to be able to restore any image/backup taken with it, if you are going to be replacing the default OS/system though!