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Cloning a Win7 ATA drive to SSD

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I have an ATA WD drive, 931 GB free, Less than 250GB used. Trying to clone that drive to a 550 GB SSD. Getting a message about sector sizes being different. Can I set the SSD during formatting to match sector size of the ATA drive (512)? Or will I not be able to clone the ATA to the SSD?

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You won't be able to clone in this case.  Instead, you would need to do a full disk backup and then restore the image to the new drive.  Result should be the same, plus you get a backup in the process (which is a good safety net).

45437: Acronis True Image Does Not Clone Drives with Different Logic Sector Sizes

 

56634: Acronis True Image: Cloning Disks

 

 

Bobbo, new question.  My Crucial 500 GB SSD is not being seen by Windows even though plugged in to hard power and ATA plug. Thoughts on why this might be?

Does it show up in the bios? Perhaps it is just not initialized and/or Windiws did not assign a drive letter automatically? What does disk manager show if it is showing up in the bios? Perhaps a screenshot or two of disk manager would shed some light.

The SSD is showing in the BIOS. It is also showing in Disk Management as a basic disk, F: , Healthy (Primary Partition). 489 GB NTFS. Dang! and now it's showing in Windows 'Computer' as a disk f:. So I guess now I will be able to do a full backup of the C: drive to one of my other devices, then restore it to the SSD, which *should* become the Win7 boot drive........correct??

I'm guessing the disk just wasn't initialized the first time - not really sure.

To recover to the SSD:

1) Take a full disk image of the oirginal drive (select all paritions)

2) Save image to another drive/location

3) Power off the system, pull the original drive, put the new SSD on the same SATA connector as the original

4) Boot the offline recovery media and restore the image to the new SSD drive... NOTE:  make sure you boot the recovery media to match how the original OS was installed (legacy for a legacy/MBR OS isntall or UEFI or a UEFI/GPT OS install.  You can never revert from UEFI/GPT to Legacy/MBR - although booting your media in legacy mode will try to and it will say successful, but it won't boot.  You can usually convert from legacy/mbr to UEFI/GPT if your motherboard supports UEFI boot and the bios is properly configured.   However, for simplicity and best results, try to restore your image teh same way it was originally created).  

5) After the restore, power down, remove your Acronis bootable recovery media adn boot into the bios.  Make sure teh boot order has the new SSD in the first boot position (note:  if this is a UEFI install, it should be listed as "Windows boot manager" and not the actual SSD device)

6) If all looks well, try to boot the system now (keep in mind that the original drive was removed earlier to reduce boot issues with duplicate OS disks being installed at the same time and to preserve the original disk as a failsafe to avoid anything accidentally happening to it).