Skip to main content

Unable to clone internal M2 Sata SSD to larger external M2 Sata SSD

Thread needs solution

Hi, 

I have an Asus Vivobook Flip 14 that came with a 128gb M2 Sata SSD. I am trying to clone the disk to a 480gb M2 Sata SSD in an external enclosure. 

Regardless of whether I use a USB 2 or 3 port on the laptop, the cloning process hangs at the "Preparing.... Calculating time" stage. 

I did a test clone from the 128gb M2 drive to a 250gb Sata HDD and that seemed to work.

Any ideas? 

0 Users found this helpful

Christian, welcome to these public User Forums.

Cloning any laptop internal drive to an external drive is likely to cause problems including not being bootable when the external drive is installed.

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.

I would recommend creating the ATI Rescue Media and making a full disk backup of the current working source SSD before doing anything else.  These are your recovery safety nets, and you could also simply recover the backup to the new SSD using the recovery media instead of using cloning.

Personally I have not used cloning with my own M.2 SSD's as I have no suitable adapter to connect 2 with and have no systems with 2 slots for this type of drive, therefore I have always used Backup & Recovery to migrate to a new or larger drive.

The steps in outline are as follows:

  1. Create the Acronis Rescue Media (use the Simple option for WinPE)
  2. Test booting your laptop from the rescue media, ensuring you understand how to boot in UEFI mode and can 'see' your current SSD drive and an external backup drive to hold a full disk backup image.
  3. Make a new full Disk backup of the working SSD to an external drive as a one-off backup action.
  4. Shutdown the PC, remove the current SSD and install the new SSD.
  5. Boot from the Acronis Rescue Media with your backup drive connected.
  6. Recover the Backup from step 3. to the new SSD.
  7. Check the Log messages before exiting from the rescue media (all logs are lost on exit) to check all is OK.
  8. If all ok, disconnect the external drive, remove the rescue media and restart the PC normally from the new SSD.
  9. When you have confirmed all is ok with the new SSD, make a new backup again to include any new device drivers installed for the new SSD.

Note: if your new SSD is larger than the original one, then you may find that ATI has not expanded the C: OS partition to use the full new size of the new SSD.  If so, then this is quite simple to resolve as below:

First, download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software, install this, then use it to move the Windows Recovery partition (that is shown after the C: OS partition) to the end of the available unallocated space. 

Next, resize the C: OS partition to use the available unallocated space.

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