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Cloning a drive from a laptop onto a different drive

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How would I go about cloning a drive from my laptop onto my desktop, then transfer that onto a new drive that will go into my laptop?  I do not have Acronis on any of system than my desktop and I still wish to make this transfer.  Thank you.

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Robert, welcome to these public User Forums.

I would not recommend doing this on your desktop as it may not produce a working clone copy of the laptop drive.

Use the Acronis application on your desktop to create the Acronis bootable Rescue Media on either a USB stick (2GB to max 32GB size, formatted FAT32), or a CD/DVD disc.

Then use that rescue media to boot your laptop for such operations, but highly recommended to make a full Disk backup of the laptop drive to an external backup drive before attempting to do any clone operation.

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.

Also see forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this - which was written after dealing with many cloning issues in the forums. 

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