Aller au contenu principal

Dual boot with cloned disk from previous laptop

Thread needs solution

I have a new laptop with a M2.SSD 256 GB running windows 10.  The laptop, HP Proobook 470 G5, has a bay where I wish to mount the SSD  (2TB) which I recently have successfully cloned from a HDD (2TB), which now are running on the older laptop.  

I would like to just move the SSD from the old laptop, which already have a dual boot system, with two different partitions, the main running Windows 7 Ultimate, and the second Windows 10 - and then be able to choose to boot the preinstalled windows 10 on the M2.SSD, or one of the two bootable systems on the second SSD.   Is this possible ?

It is not an option to create a partition on the M2.SSD and clone the old system to that, since the disk already contains approx 800 GB - i.e. 3 times more than the total available space on the M2.SSD. 

As a test, I tried to mount the old HDD in the bay, then selected the boot order to first boot from the HDD, but the system reported "no bootable media found".     I wonder if the task is complicated by the new HP running an UEFI system, while the old laptop is an old (6 years) BIOS-based system (?).  

I realize that this maybe not is strictly a "cloning" issue,  but does anyone in this forum have any idea if the mission is possible, and if so, how to accomplish the task without reinstalling either of the OS'es.     Any suggestions will be highly appreciated.

0 Users found this helpful

Roar, welcome to these User Forums.

In principle you should be able to get your laptop to be able to dual-boot with the two drives but this will require a different approach than by just trying to boot from the second drive 'as is'.

The fact that your second drive is in itself a dual-boot environment (with Windows 7 & 10) will complicate the process, mainly because Windows 7 will require the use of the Acronis Universal Restore tool in order to attempt to prepare that OS (when restored to a drive using the new laptop hardware) to work with that new hardware.   Windows 10 is far better at handling such hardware changes than Windows 7.

The approach that I believe will be needed will involve using an additional disk drive or needing to format the second drive that is to be installed in the new laptop.

There are also elements of migration that are needed to take place here.  UEFI requires that the drive is using GPT partitioning, so your current old drive would need to be converted from MBR to GPT.  This is handled by Acronis True Image by booting the laptop from the Rescue Media in UEFI mode then performing a restore of a backup from the original drive to a drive in the new laptop where this migration from MBR to GPT will be done.

Other considerations here relate to the disk controller mode used by the two migrated Windows OS which must be supported by the new laptop, or else appropriate device drivers provided which would be applied by Acronis Universal Restore. 

The approach that I would suggest would be as follows:

Make a full disk backup of your old laptop drive (with Win 7 & 10) to a separate backup drive.

Create the Acronis bootable Rescue Media and separate Acronis Universal Restore media, and test that you can boot the new laptop using these media.  This can be on CD/DVD or USB stick - if the latter then the USB should be FAT32 format and less than 32gb in size.  Ideally, this media should be created on the new laptop where it will be used. 

Make a full disk backup of your new laptop M.2 SSD drive to your backup drive (as a protection precaution against any errors).

Ideally, if possible, remove the M.2 SSD drive from the new laptop, then install the 2TB (SSD or HDD) drive in that laptop.

Boot the laptop from the Acronis Rescue Media with the backup drive connected and restore the backup from the old laptop to the 2TB drive and allow the migration from MBR to GPT to take place.

Shutdown then replace the Acronis Rescue media with the Universal Restore media and boot from that.  Check that you can select either the Windows 7 or 10 OS and apply Universal Restore to each in turn, supplying any additional disk or motherboard chipset drivers that may be needed by the tool.  Note: it is possible that you could leave the restored Windows 10 OS alone and not apply Universal Restore to that OS and let Windows try to handle any device driver changes when you boot that OS.

Note: as it stands at the point above, you would probably need to change the UEFI boot option in the BIOS in order to select the Windows Boot Manager for the restored drive OS's.  If you still have the M.2 SSD installed, then you should see 2 options for Windows Boot Manager, one from each of the two drives present.

You could use a tool such as EasyBCD later to add the additional 2 Windows OS's to the original M.2 Windows Boot Manager BCD configuration if everything is working.

Please understand that you will need licenses for the Windows OS's being migrated from the old laptop for these to work with the new laptop.  If either of these OS's are OEM versions, then this will not be activated on different hardware.

Roar,

Steve outlined a solid plan for you here, I think you will run into issue with Windows 7 because as far as I know conversion from an MBR to UEFI/GPT is not possible for Windows 7.  Windows 7 if clean installed on a UEFI booted system will work but I have yet to see a conversion succeed.  

En réponse à par truwrikodrorow…

Thank you very much, Steve; for your interest and effort in this matter.  This will of course be very interesting to try out, and sure it will take some time to complete the steps ( -especially since I'm in the auditing and accounting profession and have a lot of deadlines to meet this and next month).    So it may take a while before I will be able to report how your suggestions works for this case;  but I'm very grateful for your help so far.  

In the mean time I have tested if it is possible to do a clean new windows 7 install on a separate partition on the SSD, but I ran into problems related tot the NVME drivers for the XG5 (Toshiba OCZ ) M2.SSD.  It seems that there is no official released drivers; at least not yet, probably due to that this is an OEM product for the HP probook, so I have note succeeded even in this first step.  I tried both installing directly from (external) DVD, and several tests making a bootable USB stick (using Rufus  www.rufus.akeo.ic ) , including replacing files as described by Microsoft hotfixes for NVME and win7 (KB Article Numbers: 3087873 and 2990941), .    

My challenge is that the windows 7 installation works fine for me in itself, with a huge number of installed programs and applications with my own settings and preferences, which will take "months" to regain on a new windows 10 from scratch - and still I definitely prefer win7 as my 'production environment' even if I'm also using a couple of other desktop pc's with. win10. 

I will update this thread when I'm doing any progress,  so far, again thanks a lot for trying to help!     

Roar,

I wouldn't worry much about the driver for the Toshiba drive.  The NVMe driver you read about is actually an Intel driver for the Disk Controller installed in the PC.  Without the proper driver Windows 7 cannot locate the drive due to Windows 7 lacking native support for NVMe devices.  The Microsoft HotFix addresses the issue and the result is that with the Fix the Windows installer will locate the drive and install Win 7 to it.

Enchantech,  Thank you for your feedback.   However, even when following the MS description for applying the hotfixes properly,  the installation still halts, and asks for the NMVe drivers, with the option to "Load driver" - - but I'm not able to find how / where this drivers should be found.   Any suggestions where to look, how to find out if the hotfixes really have been applied ? - or what to do next. 

Obviously it have to be an issue here.  I found a site where this is discussed - and link to different drivers ( https://www.win-raid.com/t29f25-Recommended-AHCI-RAID-and-NVMe-Drivers…)   but this do not include a signed OCZ driver for XG5, only for XG3.   I tried to download anyway, extracted to a folder on the installation USB. The drivers are then found, but reports 'not applicable for my drive'.     I'm still stuck ...  

 

The win-raid site drivers are top notch.  I have used them myself with good results.  Under the Toshiba drivers you will see mod+signed drivers. These are modded and digitally signed by the owner of the site.  They show to support your drive. I would give them a try.  Extract the contents of the download and place them all on a spare flash drive.  When asked to add drivers during install point to the flash drive. It should work.