How to clone existing hard drive and copy to new Solid State hard drive without copying Windows 10 to new SSD?
I have a 12 year old existing hard drive that has 39 bad sectors on it. It was recommended by another forum that this drive is failing. I do Acronis True Image backups weekly and just did a full backup with True Image 2020 with weekly incremental ones.
I purchased a new Crucial 2.5" internal solid state hard drive for my HP Envy 17t notebook and will be installing this into it as the 2nd hard drive. There is an existing Samsung M2 MZNTE512HMJH-000H1 in this notebook with Windows 10 Home Edition.
Because this is a 12 year old Dell XPS running Windows 10 Home Edition it had a lot of errors that I received notification from my Norton Suite of products. I corrected the errors using tools recommended to me but I am concerned that there might be more errors in this existing Windows 10 and registry issues.
My question since I have already done the incremental backup from this existing hard drive is how can I copy all of the files, folders and applications to this new solid state hard drive without installing this existing Windows 10 from the Dell machine?
Crucial uses Acronis software to migrate the data I saw on their website.
I could connect a SATA-USB cable from the existing Dell computer to the new Solid State hard drive but this would be extremely slow. Bootup time on this Dell computer sometimes takes up to 10 minutes whereas on my HP Envy with the existing solid state hard drive takes less than 10 seconds to bootup.
But since I already have the incremental backup, can I just use this to clone to the new solid state hard drive or copy the image? But again, I DO NOT WANT TO INSTALL THE EXISTING WINDOWS 10 OPERATING SYSTEM FROM THE SOURCE HARD DRIVE. I want to use the Windows 10 operating system installed on the existing Samsung to boot up the HP Envy notebook.
Please recommend how is the easiest way to do this?
Thank you for any assistance all of you can offer on this!
Thank you for your reply.
It was the opinion from a forum post that the existing hard drive is failing. It said I had only 36 days remaining,
But the Crystal test said the drive's health was excellent. It just said I had 39 bad sectors on it.
I'll read your link to the Acronis article when I get back this afternoon.
So basically, I can just "recover just the user data (documents, music, pictures, videos) from that backup to a new replacement drive and do a clean install of Windows 10 on that new drive first, but you would still need to reinstall any other applications separately." If this is the case, I would not be cloning the new solid state hard drive? Is that an accurate statement?
And since I already have Windows 10 installed on this HP notebook with the 1st Samsung M2 drive, why would I need to install a new clean copy of Windows 10? I'm asking this as I am not that familiar with this.
I'm at best an intermediate at all of this, but I continue to learn as I go!!
Just to clarify, the new Solid State hard drive is being installed in my HP Envy notebook, not the 12 yr old Dell XPS desktop.
Fredric, this is why I was asking for clarification here because you are mentioning two different computers with the Dell XPS and your HP Envy.
If all you are wanting to do is to move your user data from the potentially failing drive to a new SSD to be used in the HP Envy, then you can do this by either recovering that data from your Dell backup using the ATI GUI on the HP (being careful to not recovery the original permissions & ownership of that data), or else you could simply use Explorer and double-click on the Dell backup file and use normal Copy & Paste commands to bring the data from the backup to your new SSD on the HP Envy.
Cloning is a whole disk operation intended to made an identical copy of 2 drives (Source to Target) and would bring everything on the drive with it. See the link in my signature to a document that gives a full description of the differences between cloning and backup.
Thank you Steve,
I just read your reply and will reread it to try to get my head clear on what you mean.
And I'll read your links to further grasp what you're saying. My friend is a whiz at all of this and will actually be doing the transfer so I'm confident he will understand exactly what you're recommending.
I'll keep you posted. Thank you again Steve!!!
Ok Steve,
I think I understand. In the link to the article it says:
"Either way (backup and recovery of the entire disk or disk clone) you can transfer the whole operating system and installed programs to a new disk."
So if I just do a recovery of all files and folders from my incremental Acronis True Image 2020 backup since I am not recovering the installed Windows 10 Home Edition from the source Dell XPS, the applications have to be reinstalled on the HP Envy notebook since they are not integrated into the registry of the Windows 10 Home Edition already installed on the existing Samsung M2 solid state hard drive? Am I correct or partially correct or completely offbase?
Ok Steve,
I think I understand. In the link to the article it says:
"Either way (backup and recovery of the entire disk or disk clone) you can transfer the whole operating system and installed programs to a new disk."
So if I just do a recovery of all files and folders from my incremental Acronis True Image 2020 backup since I am not recovering the installed Windows 10 Home Edition from the source Dell XPS, the applications have to be reinstalled on the HP Envy notebook since they are not integrated into the registry of the Windows 10 Home Edition already installed on the existing Samsung M2 solid state hard drive? Am I correct or partially correct or completely offbase?
Fredric, let me give you an example that I have done myself over the past couple of days.
I was asked to upgrade a Dell Latitude laptop from Win 7 to Win 10, so my first action was to make a full disk backup of the working Win 7 system. This is normally a simple thing but the backup kept giving errors for 'cannot read sector....' which is not what I wanted to see, especially as the drive was a mSATA SSD.
I was able to make a backup by telling ATI to ignore all the errors but when I tried to recover this to a new mSATA SSD it gave me BSOD's when trying to boot into Win 7.
The conclusion of a lot of trying was that I had to do a clean install of Win 7 on the new SSD, then I recovered just the user data (documents, music, pictures & videos, plus downloads and browser favourites) from the backup to the new SSD.
At that point, I had to identify what other programs needed to be installed, which fortunately was only Microsoft Office Home & Business 2013 plus various freeware programs, which I was able to do. After that, the upgrade from 7 to 10 went smoothly, the user didn't lose any data and has the benefit of a clean install to work from instead of 5+ years of accumulated temp files etc.
In a sense this is similar to your situation in that you are only taking the user data from the old Dell XPS drive, and will need to reistall any applications that are not already present on your HP Envy.
Thank you Steve,
That makes a lot of sense. The HP Envy is 5 years old. Can I just use the existing Windows 10 Home Edition that is on the Samsung M2 SSD and then have the data recovered to the new Crucial SSD and then install the applications to run the data I recovered from the Acronis backup from the Dell XPS or am I missing something still that would need to be done?
That should be fine Fredric. The HP Envy should continue to run 'as is' with the existing Windows 10 Home edition and install applications from your Samsung SSD, and if you recover the user data from your Dell XPS to the new Crucial SSD, then that will be accessible to your current applications on the HP, so you would only need to install any other applications if needed to work with that recovered user data.
Just one point to reiterate with regards to the data from the Dell XPS, and that is not to recover the original files & folders permissions. This is because every user is unique to the computer where the user was created, so even if you use the identical user name on both computers, they will never be the same. One will be HP_Envy/Fredric and the other will be Dell_XPS/Fredric, so if the original permissions are recovered, HP_Envy/Fredric won't have permission to access the data owned by Dell_XPS/Fredric!
See KB 63240: Acronis True Image 2020: how to restore files from a backup (Windows) for more information on the recovery options and the ATI 2020 User Guide for specific permissions information.
Wow. I had to reread your expert reply for it to sink in to my tired brain!!
So how do you tell the new Crucial SSD to not recover the original files and folders permissions? (I'll read the KB articles you referenced next) I just read the KB articles after posting the reply.
Is this what you meant when you said above?, "Just one point to reiterate with regards to the data from the Dell XPS, and that is not to recover the original files & folders permissions.
From the KB ATI 2020 article "To eliminate this kind of problem, you can disable preserving file security settings in backups. Then the recovered files/folders will always inherit the permissions from the folder to which they are recovered (parent folder or disk, if recovered to the root).
Or, you can disable file security settings during recovery, even if they are available in the backup. The result will be the same."
I'm assuming that the easiest way to transfer the backup data from the Dell XPS to the new Crucial one would be to install the Crucial SSD in its bay and plug in my WD External Passport where the Acronis 2020 True Image Home Edition incremental backup is and then recover the files and folders to the Crucial SSD. Will that work?
I did buy a SATA-USB 3.0 cable but forgot about the WD External Hard drive that already has the backup on it.
Thank you again Steve!! I really appreciate all of your suggestions, expertise and patience with me!!
PS I should have the Crucial drive perhaps late week as I received an alert it is being shipped. But due to the Corona situation it might take longer to receive so I am hoping I get all of my questions on how to proceed answered.
I'm assuming that the easiest way to transfer the backup data from the Dell XPS to the new Crucial one would be to install the Crucial SSD in its bay and plug in my WD External Passport where the Acronis 2020 True Image Home Edition incremental backup is and then recover the files and folders to the Crucial SSD. Will that work?
Yes, that should be the best method.
The actual recovery process is fairly straight-forward - see the attached zip file with screen images of a dummy run for one of my own backups.
Screen shot ATI 05 is where I see the options below from the KB article you sent me:
- Recover files with their original security settings - if the file security settings were preserved during backup (see File-level security settings for backup), you can choose whether to recover them or let the files inherit the security settings of the folder where they will be recovered to. This option is effective only when recovering files from file/folder backups.
- Set current date and time for recovered files - you can choose whether to recover the file date and time from the backup or assign the files the current date and time. By default the file date and time from the backup will be assigned.
Is there any reason why someone would prefer to have the original date/time assigned rather than a current one?
Thank you for the screenshots. Being somewhat familiar with the ATI 2018 and recently upgraded to 2020, they look very straightforward as to what to do!
I have a non related question for you regarding when you look at a ATI bakcup. Picture images such as jpg show up just as a folder with a file name and .jpg Is there any way that I can see what the image is in the backup? Otherwise, I would have to open every single file listed to locate it.
Thank you again Steve.
I'll keep you updated when the drive is being recovered successfully (I hope!!!)
Stay well.
Fred
Is there any reason why someone would prefer to have the original date/time assigned rather than a current one?
That really is a user decision but I have always kept the original date/time as that makes more sense to me otherwise all the recovered files / folders will all have the same timestamp for when the recovery is done.
I have a non related question for you regarding when you look at a ATI bakcup. Picture images such as jpg show up just as a folder with a file name and .jpg Is there any way that I can see what the image is in the backup? Otherwise, I would have to open every single file listed to locate it.
Unfortunately the way ATI backup archives are handled does not give a preview or thumbnail view of image files, so the only real way to get such a view would be to recover the files to a temporary location then view them in the normal Windows Explorer or other application.