Basic approach to restoration-migration?

Jeremy, welcome to these User Forums.

Some initial thoughts:

First, you wrote: I've been limping along for some time (months), getting backups of my Lenovo X220/Win7SP1 with a 500GB Crucial SSD (that I installed 1.5 years ago) only by toggling "ignore all" after getting error messages 'Failed to read data from the disk."

This would worry me and I would want to solve this issue before migrating this OS & applications etc to another computer.  What data is stored in the areas that your backups are ignoring due to errors?

It is unusual to hear of such errors from an SSD drive, these are essentially very large permanent memory modules rather than the older spinning disk technology with potential bad sectors, head crashes, actuator failures etc.  I would be tempted to get a replacement drive (HDD or SSD) and attempt to do a full disk recovery to the new drive then see if your computer will work correctly and make new backups without giving further errors?

Next, there are real chances that you will have issues trying to get your old Windows 7 SP1 OS to work correctly with the new hardware in your chosen new computer, especially if it has new components that have no equivalent Windows 7 device drivers available from Lenovo.

I would recommend upgrading the old Lenovo computer from Windows 7 to Windows 10 with the same OS version as you will have on the new Lenovo computer, i.e. both Win 10 Home or both Pro.  This will help in the longer term migration process as both computers would then have a valid MS activation for the same version of Windows 10 based on the different hardware signatures of both computers.

You further wrote: I want to move everything to a mint Lenovo X230t running Win10 that I acquired; I've updated it with a new 500GB Samsung EVO SSD. It appears that I cannot downgrade to Win7 and then upgrade back to Win10 without additional license purchases from M$ for that computer.

What method of connection does your new 500GB Samsung EVO SSD drive use in the new computer?  If this is an NVMe PCIe / M.2 SSD drive, then there is a further issue with Windows 7 having no native device drivers for this type of drive technology.  Again, you would be better served by keeping to Windows 10 on the new computer. 

Next you wrote: I have a relatively large arsenal of programs (accounting, graphics, GIS, wireless mapping, MS Office, utilities) and associated data, so I'm trying to find a way around nually migrating everything piece by piece.

How are your main applications licenced and activated?  I would recommend checking this as some such as MS Office are activated based on the hardware signature of the computer where it is installed, so moving it to different hardware will break that activation and may require a new licence. 

Steve,

Thank you for your fast and comprehensive reply.

You said:

"I would recommend upgrading the old Lenovo computer from Windows 7 to Windows 10 with the same OS version as you will have on the new Lenovo computer, i.e. both Win 10 Home or both Pro.  This will help in the longer term migration process as both computers would then have a valid MS activation for the same version of Windows 10 based on the different hardware signatures of both computers."

So I would purchase a Win10 Pro license for the old machine, then transfer it to the newer Lenovo. (I'm thinking the older Lenovo--with a new SSD--becomes a dedicated Linux host in this scenario).

"What method of connection does your new 500GB Samsung EVO SSD drive use in the new computer?"

It's SATA, so that's probably not a problem, but I understand there may be other driver/device issues.

"How are your main applications licenced and activated?  I would recommend checking this as some such as MS Office are activated based on the hardware signature of the computer where it is installed, so moving it to different hardware will break that activation and may require a new licence."

My MS Office suite is 365-SAS--so that shouldn't be a problem. I'll run through my important programs and see, but I think this won't be a problem. I understand 10 tries to run earlier apps under VM versions of earlier Windows OS as needed.

I'll order a new SSD and Win10pro license and report back when I have more. Thanks again.

Jeremy wrote: So I would purchase a Win10 Pro license for the old machine, then transfer it to the newer Lenovo. (I'm thinking the older Lenovo--with a new SSD--becomes a dedicated Linux host in this scenario).

The new Win 10 Pro license would be for the old machine only unless you pay out extra for a full Retail version license which permits moving between different computers.  If your new laptop already have a valid Win 10 Pro license and is activated, then this is what your migrated Win 10 OS will use on that machine.

I am sure that your old computer should be more than capable of running most modern Linux distros.  I am running Ubuntu 16.04 on a very old Dell Optiplex computer plus have Ubuntu 18.04 on my laptop.

I'd be surprised if the "old" Lenovo i5 with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD couldn't run Linux (Mint 18.3, in my case)!

I'm trying to figure out the process order to get this done as safely as reasonably possible--first try to restore from the (compromised?) ATI backup to the new SSD in the old laptop, or try to upgrade to Win10 pro first on the existing SSD, and hope that the upgrade cures or ignores the problem/s flagged by ATI and now some disk utilities. (Remembering the ATI backups only run with "ignore all errors" toggled.)

I wonder if I can successfully create an ISO image of the existing drive as it is as, as a safety fallback.

I find the MS licensing system pretty confusing. For starters, I just downloaded the Win10 installer from MS to a USB key and will see if things go as described here:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-window…

since I'm running licensed version of Win7 pro, and see if does just auto self-license. If not, I can always by a license. Not sure whether that would be a full transferable license at retail, or the downloads with purported valid licenses as low as $30--presumably single use--that come up on a quick search.

Jeremy, the first step I would recommend would be to ensure that you have created and tested the bootable Acronis Rescue media with your old laptop.

The reason for this advice is that you could then use that rescue media to boot the old laptop into the ATI application, with your new SSD attached if this is possible, then attempt to clone from the old SSD to the new one.  If you cannot attach the new SSD then connect your backup drive to the old laptop and try to make a full disk & partitions backup of the old SSD using the rescue media - this will be totally outside of any interference from Windows or any installed applications etc, and should give you a better understanding of whether the errors you are ignoring are still present when Windows is not active?

If you can make this offline backup of the old SSD, then the next step would be to shutdown and replace the old SSD with the new one, then repeat the process using the Rescue Media but this time recover your backup to the new SSD.

If all goes well with the recovery to the new SSD, then boot into Windows 7 from that drive and check that all is still as expected.

I get the same error messages indicating bad sectors trying to back up to my external HDD via the Recovery Disk. I see Anita C. just checked in with the same error. Since I've gone through the complete report and VSS routine in the previous support issue, I guess I'm down to the final advice I got at the end of that process..."Reinstall Windows." I expect that to be a nightmare.

I should add that I purchased the old machine with 7Home and purchased a shrink-wrapped microsoft upgrade key to Pro and have been running Pro on it for years. According to a call to M$ support, I will need to purchase a new full 7 Pro license to reinstall it. Ridiculous.

Jeremy, if you are seeing the same errors when backing up from your rescue media, then that just eliminates Windows and any installed applications as being contributors to those errors.

The next step would be to still make the full disk backup in this way to an external drive, ignoring the errors as you have been doing, then install a new disk drive in place of the one giving the errors, followed by attempting to recover your full disk backup to that new drive.

If you are able to recover the backup and this will boot into Windows successfully, then that will become your new starting point for any next steps without the need for a full install of Windows 7 or buying new licenses for the same.

These first actions are trying to overcome the issue with the disk errors before attempting any upgrade to Windows 10 and migration to new hardware.

Well, I'm getting closer. I was able to clone the old SSD to the new SSD while it was connected via a USB-SCSI adapter. After the installing the Samsung SSD in the old laptop, it behaved perfectly, including creating an ATI full backup without any error messages. I then took a flyer, and installed Win10 pro per the article referenced above; it's running fine, and never asked for a license ID.

My question now is whether I need to create a Universal Boot Disk and do the Universal Restore Process in order to migrate all of my programs and data, or whether I should simply be able to create a Rescue Disk with the new Win10pro laptop and use it to restore from the full disk backup I've created with the old machine after the Win10pro upgrade.

Jeremy, thanks for your update - sounds like you are definitely making good progress by being able to clone to the new SSD and then upgrade this successfully to Windows 10.  I would recommend checking your Activation status as shown in the main Windows 10 Settings > Update & Security > Activation.

Your next steps should be to create a new full disk & partitions backup of your working old Windows 10 computer plus the same for your new Windows 10 computer (in case you want /  need to get back to your starting point).

Next, use your normal Acronis Rescue media to boot your new computer and restore the backup from the old one (at a disk level).

If the restore goes well, then test booting into Windows 10 on the new computer to see if you are successful.  Windows 10 can handle this type of hardware migration much better than older versions of Windows.

If there are problems booting into Windows, then you should boot from the Universal Restore media and then apply this to the new computer - this should identify if any additional device drivers are needed.