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Clone of WD HDD (1TB) to new WD Green (1TB) - FAIL

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I have a 1TB WD HDD in my laptop that I would like to upgrade to a new 1TB WD Green SDD. I have downloaded Acronis True Image for Western Digital and every time I attempt to clone the drive it fails. I bought a 1TB internal SDD (WD Green) to replace a WD 1TB drive (HDD) in my laptop.
I have run chkdsk and scanned the HDD  for errors or bad sectors and there are none. It is unable to complete the copy (or start) the C:\ drive partition.

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Peter, welcome to these public User Forums.

In your PM to me, you also wrote:

I thought this would be relatively straightforward, but I have been at this for 2 weeks and tried Minitool and it fails using that program as well. It completes the first 9 of 17 operations, but then gets stuck on 'Copy Partition C:\ which is nearly the full 1TB in size (and contains the OS).

The above suggests that there may be more than one potential issue in play here:

CHKDSK can only check partitions that have an allocated drive letter, so does not check the other hidden / system partitions present on the OS drive.

The second issue is that SSD drives should have around 20% free space in order to work efficiently which if your source HDD is nearly full is likely to be a reason for cloning to fail.

Note: See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.

I would recommend moving some data from your source HDD to a spare drive then retrying the clone.  If you see any further errors, then save a copy of the Log for the operation before leaving the offline environment (if using Acronis rescue media).

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.

Is there a setting in the WD green drive to prevent sleep?  One issue I've read in other forums about those drives is that they go into sleep mode even when "active" at times.  I hope that's not the case here, and probably not likely, but that is one of the biggest down sides of the power management features of the green drives.

If the clone is not working, next step (and my preference anyway), would be to take a full backup of the source drive and store it where it is accessible (like an external USB drive).  Remove the original drive, pop in the new drive and restore the image to the new drive.

The results are the same as the clone process.  However, it is SAFER as you now also have an exact backup of the system before doing anything else and that backup can be restored to any drive, should there be any issues with the source or new drive at any time.  Backups are our friend and safety net.  Cloning is nice for the assumed ease-of-use, but cloning is not full proof and if you have no backup, even the cloning process can cause issues if something goes wrong in the process. 

One other thought/note... 1TB drives are not necessarily the same size (usable space) depending on the buffer size.  If there is a potential issue on the original drive (chkdsk was OK, but may not be checking the hidden partitions where the bootloader or recovery partition are) and needing to do a sector-by-sector clone.  In that case, if the new drive is slightly smaller (usable space) than the original (usable space), the clone could still fail. That's another reason why taking a backup and recovering the backup could be helpful too.