Requirements for cloning
In the tutorial for cloning there is the statement:
"If you clone a disk with Windows to external USB hard drive, you will not be able to boot from it. Windows does not support booting from external USB hard drives. Please clone to internal SATA SSD or HDD instead."
I have ordered an internal SATA SSD and a SATA-to-USB cable that will allow the drive to be temporarily attached to a USB port for cloning. After cloning replace my existing (small) internal SSD with the new (larger) SSD. Does Acronis support cloning to a SATA SSD attached through a USB port? I'm obviously not concerned with Windows bieng able to boot from the USB-attached drive - just with the cloning process.
The drive comes with a utility that does support this configuration for cloning (and does the cloning under Windows), but I've read the the utility is not very reliable. I would much rather use Acronis TI if this configuration is supported.


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Yes you can clone to a SATA disk attached to USB, although it is recommended to do the other way:
- put the target disk at the same spot as the source disk,
- put the source disk on the SATA USB adapater
- clone by running ATI from the recovery CD.
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When I cloned using the utility that came with the disk - from Samsung - I thought I was successful. Windows 7 worked fine, but the upgrade to Windows 10 failed. The cloning process had done something to the 100MB System Reserved partition. It had stayed 100MB but was only 7% free.
I then recloned using Acronis. (Since I had already swapped the SSD drives I now had the recommended configuration for the Acronis cloning, so I had nothing to lose. With Acronis process I had 32% free space in the System Reserved partition and my Windows 10 upgrade succeeded.
The Acronis cloning process is inconvenient because of the reboot to Linux that happens, but there is an advantage to a cloning process that actually works correctly. And the cloning took only about 8 minutes. (The Samsung process, running under Windows) took about 30 minutes.
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