Skip to main content

Trouble with the Clone feature on exclusion step

Thread needs solution

Hello, I'm a new Acronis user. Recently I purchased a Crucial SSD and have been trying to clone some very old hard drives onto it, but I've been running into some trouble. My system is as follows:

C: 1TB WD HDD (Boot drive, over 10 years old now)

D: 1TB WD HDD

E: 4TB Crucial SATA SSD

M: 1 TB Intel NVME

Q: 250 GB Samsung SATA SSD

All running on Windows 10.

Drives C and D are almost completely full, while M has about 300 GBs free. The Q and E drives were both completely empty when I started. My goal is to migrate my operating system from C over to either Q or M, while moving everything else remaining on C, as well as all of D over to E so that I don't need to cut all of E in half to use it as a boot drive. I was able to successfully clone D over to E, but am having trouble with C. I've tried cloning C to M and excluding everything but the boot and windows files, but the program crashed. Now, I'm trying to move all of C to E while excluding the windows and boot files, but the wizard has been stuck on the exclusion step for over 10 hours now. Now, when I try to access the partition on E that D was cloned to, I get an access denied message.

 

Is there a better way to do this? I feel like I'm missing something that should be very obvious.

 

Thanks!

0 Users found this helpful

Jordan, welcome to these public User Forums.

My first recommendation is to forget completely about using cloning for what you are wanting to do here!

Make a number of separate backups using Acronis according to what data you are wanting to move but also so that you have options to allow you to recover your system should you make any mistakes or anything goes wrong in the process you are following.

Note: I would recommend reducing the amount of data on your C: OS drive by either copying any large folders of user data such as videos, photos, music etc to another drive, or else making a Files & Folders backup of that large volume of data then deleting the original from the C: drive.

This is very important when moving from a HDD to an SSD drive where you need to aim to have around 20% available free space if you want to see the performance benefits of using the SSD!

The other potential issue you may face with your current drive scenario is that assuming you did clone from C: to Q: then this can generate disk signature clash if you attempt to boot into Windows when there are two drives with the same identical disk signatures!

The recommended method to migrate the OS from the HDD to the SSD is to a) reduce the size to ensure the OS and installed applications can file on a much smaller SSD (1TB to 250GB is a very big reduction), make a Disks & Partitions backup image of the reduced size C: drive, including all hidden / system partitions required to boot Windows, then physically remove that HDD and replace it with the new SSD connecting to the same motherboard SATA controller port & cabled, followed by booting the PC using Acronis rescue media to recover the disk backup to the new SSD.

Note: when doing the above type of restore, it can be made a whole lot safer / simpler by disconnecting any other internal drives so that there is no possibility of restoring to the incorrect target drive.

Once you have migrated from the HDD to the SSD, then you can boot from the faster SSD and complete the migration from the D: drive to the new E: drive, including any data removed from the almost full original C: drive to E:  

Finally, you can manage any changes of drive letters for D: E: etc that may be needed, and connect the original C: HDD via a USB adapter to reformat it if being reused.

See KB 63226: Acronis True Image 2020: how to create bootable media and KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 63295: Acronis True Image 2020: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media