problem with upgrading NVMe M.2 SSD

Thorsten, welcome to these User Forums.

Several thoughts for this issue:

You need to confirm what BIOS mode your working Windows OS is using on the original Samsung 960 Evo SSD - run the msinfo32 command to check this - this will show as either Legacy or UEFI. 

Your ATI 2018 needs to be booted using the same BIOS mode as determined above.

When making the backup of the original Samsung 960 Evo SSD, either use the 'Entire PC' option, or else ensure that you select the SSD at a disk level so that all hidden/system partitions are selected.

After swapping the 960 SSD for the 970 one, and performing a 'disk level' recovery of your backup, you need to check your BIOS boot settings are still shown correctly.

For a Legacy boot system, the boot device is the SSD itself;  for a UEFI boot system, the boot device should be the Windows Boot Manager (not the SSD).

See forum topic:[How to] recover an entire disk backup for an example of a disk level recovery.

HI Steve,

many thanks for your fast help.
Good thoughs with UEFI or legacy.
I have had this at december, as I installed my client - it was set to UEFI + Legacy.
But I cant install Windows 10, after copying from USB key to SSD, the system didnt reboot to the SSD, until I set it up to UEFI.

So, I checked now again the BIOS, it was set again to UEFI + Legacy.

But I checked then with msinfo and saw UEFI, I set up the BIOS to UEFI and with old SSD, the 960, all is working.

I tried again, boot the system with Acronis Restore key, made a backup of 960 SSD to internal HDD, rebooted, chaned the SSD, recovered it, but no luck.

But another error message, if I understand it right, the recovery process changed the volume from C:\ to D:\.

I will read your help in the linked thread and came back.
 

Thorsten

Update:
I disconnected as next the internal HDD and made a backup to USB hdd, then restore and checked what ATI 2018 made - the system partition was named to C:\
But it want start.

I am running out of ideas now...

On another client what I have, I used the ATI 2018 to migrate from HDD SATA to SDD SATA witrh the clone function, all worked fine...

Next update:
I tried with AOMEI Partition Assistant and saw, that my system partition has the letter E:\ and the partition recovery has C:\.
I changed it, tried it - nothing, checked again, system partition is back to E:\

But if I install the "old" SSD 960, all looks fine, System is C:\ but not after restoring the image.

After power off and on and then booting with AOMEI all is wrong again,, System is C:\...

Thorsten, which type of the Acronis Rescue media are you using here?

This can be created using Linux (as used as default in all older versions), or created in 2 flavours of WinPE - one created from the Windows 10 Recovery Environment, the other by using the Windows 10 ADK.

Drive letters can be shown differently when using the Linux rescue media but should be correct when booted back into Windows again.

One of the benefits of using WinPE media is that any additional device drivers that are needed can be added to this.  It is possible that this is an area involved in your situation here?

What controller mode does your 960 EVO SSD use and how does this compare with the controller mode used by the new 970 SSD?  Both should be the same under normal circumstances else additional device drivers / support may be needed, i.e. if RAID is being used?

The normal Rescue Media (all flavours) does not have RAID support but you can use the MVP Custom ATIPE Builder script to create a better USB rescue media stick with RAID support and any other device drivers needed.  This will be a WinPE stick and can be built using WinRE or the ADK.

HI Steve,

thanks for you great help.
I used the WinPE solution to boot and create the image / backup it then.

the 970 series has a new controller, right, but no idea how I could integrate it.

For me, the SSD is detected right by Acronis software, but it could be possible, that the controller mix anything there.

Thorsten

Thorsten, you should probably go to the Samsung Support site and download any new driver package for your 970 SSD then try installing this in Windows 10 while still running from the 960 EVO, so that it is available in your backup of the OS.

If you give the MVP Custom ATIPE builder tool, you can use this to add device drivers from your computer to the rescue media.

HI Steve,

very good point, the driver for 970 and 960 are the same, but on my installtion was 2.3.x instaled, but only 3.0 supports the 970 series.
So I installed the 3.0 version, all is working fine, created a new backup, made the restore - same issue.

Normaly, it is time to say to save the time, BUT I need a solution what I could backup and restore in worstcase...

Thorsten
 

Update:
I ordered now a PCI Express Card with NVMe support, I will get them tomorrow and then, I will try clone the 960 SSD to 970 SSD then.

It may be worth trying a Live Clone run from within Windows when you can connect both SSD's but this works best when the target SSD is 'empty' such that no OS can be detected on it.

One other thought, have you recovered the MBR & Track 0 data when restoring to the new SSD?  This will be necessary as the drive is new and would not have this data present already.

Final thought, check / compare what Windows Disk Management shows for both SSD's when you can connect both and look from Windows?

HI,

yesterday, I got the M2 NVMe Adapter for PCI Express, I used the boot key to start Acronis Rescue Media, chosed clone the 960 to 970, deinstalled the 960, installed to 970 to the onobard place - all is working fine.

I have no idea, which bug Acronis has, but there should be a bug and for me is the software to imaging of NVMe SSDs not working.

Thorsten

Hi Thorsten, first, I am glad that you have achieved the desired end result for migrating to the new 970 SSD, albeit it was not through the expected route.

With regards to any 'bug' in True Image, I can neither agree or disagree with you, as am not in a position where I could attempt to replicate your migration scenario - what I do agree with is that this should have been possible using the initial steps you were trying, so can only recommend that you should open a Support Case direct with Acronis for this issue, assuming that you want to pursue it further?

Same Problem happend to me. Only cloning the drive worked. There must be an bug in ATI.

madmarc69 wrote:

Same problem happend to me. Only cloning the drive worked. There must be an bug in ATI.

I ran across the same issue today, upgrading my 960 pro to a 970 evo 2tb. system runs in uefi and made backup image from windows client and also from linux based bootable media. Both gave me the same exact error inaccessible boot device in windows 10. I went into the recovery of windows 10 and did a diskpart to find my efi partition. mounted it as it wasn't and then formatted it. After formatting it I did a bcdboot C:\windows /s V: /f UEFI   

the V: is the mountpoint for the efi partition. Rebooted system and all worked after fine. So it looks like acronis 2018 ( i did not tested with 2019) does not properly recreate the efi partition. I'm linking below the page that gave me the info to get through this

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/win…

As a side not for those using OPAL 2 based drives you can load  PBA image using sedutil and run your drive locked encrypted in hardware sense these drives have built in hardware encryption. search google for sedutil

Newbie here.

And am I glad to get here.

I've come to post on this thread, because I thought my issue was similar to Thorsten Dörr's.

Though mine was an up-sizing and upgrading to a bigger/better M2.

I've had a few months of failures with my True Image Cloning, whilst trying to up-size my old desktop from 250 GB SATA SSD to a Samsung Evo 500 GB SATA SSD.

The problems were probably compounded by the fact that the 250 SSD(Intel) was only showing 98% in Acronis Drive Monitor. I also ran Windows 7 from one of the HDDs in the desktop, which I use to upload my videos through firewire.(Windows 10 stopped supporting firewire a couple of years ago)

A few years ago, when I first got Acronis True Image 13, I had no problems at all cloning 3 of our laptops to SSDs.

I upgraded to Acronis True Image 16, a while later, but cannot recall when I began having cloning problems with this version. Please don't talk too technically to me in relation to this; I do try to read up on things, before I do them, but in real life I'm a 'read instructions as a last resort' bloke.

Anyway, after my recent failures with the old desktop PC, I 'bit the bullet' and bought a new Acer Predator G3, for a good sale price at HN.

Acer Predator G3-710

Intel® Core™ i7-7700 processor Quad-core 3.60 GHz

16 GB, DDR4 SDRAM

Original:- Hynix 128gb Hfs128g39tnd-n210a Internal M.2 SATA SSD Drive with 2 TB Data HDD

Now:- Samsung 970 EVO 500GB PCIe NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive SSD with 2 TB Data HDD and 3 TB Data HDD,

Also removable 4 TB HDD.

NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 with 6 GB Dedicated Memory

64 Bit OS Windows 10 Home

I want to use this desktop for video editing(amateur) and it seemed a good base pc to start with. However, I thought that the Hynix 128 GB M2. SSD may fill up quite quickly and I thought the Samsung 970 EVO 500GB PCIe NVMe M.2 would be a bit better for dealing with video.

I couldn't figure out how to clone the drives, because the 970 PCIe won't work through a Sata enclosure etc.

So I did some back ups; Windows and Acronis and for good measure, a windows system image. Then I created a recovery stick.

Next I took the desktop side off, took out the graphics card and replaced the Hynix 128Gb with the 970 Evo 500GB.

While at it, I installed a 3TB HDD from my old desktop and fitted a removable 4TB HDD from a WD Mycloud, which I thought would be better as a data disk.

When I fired up the desktop with recovery stick, I managed to get windows installed.

I then thought that I could use the windows system image to get back a bit of progress with programs etc., that I'd already installed.

Back to square one.......got into a never ending repair cycle.

So I recovered again and have settled down to manually reloading all my stuff again. Well, that's what I thought I'd do, till I came across this forum.

I do have Acronis back ups, which if they worked would save me a few days installations.

Even if I got the backup to work, I still have further video upgrade stuff to go on.

I'm thinking to just carry on installing, with incremental backups as I go.

Any offers of advice are welcome.

Oh and now Acronis Drive Monitor tells me that it can't SMART monitor my new Samsung 970 EVO 500GB PCIe NVMe M.2.

I'm hoping support may tell me how to run a script for it.

Any help with setting a Custom Script to monitor my Samsung Evo 500 GB NVMe PCIe SSD, would be greatly appreciated.

In the meantime I'll try to work it out.

As a 71 year old Boilermaker, I sometimes I wish I could just go back Boilermaking.

Oh and now Acronis Drive Monitor tells me that it can't SMART monitor my new Samsung 970 EVO 500GB PCIe NVMe M.2.

Please see KB  58078: Acronis Drive Monitor - where it states:

Acronis has discontinued developing Acronis Drive Monitor, therefore new operating systems like Windows 8/8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012/2012R2 and others are not supported.

I would suggest going to the Samsung support web site and downloading a copy of their Samsung Magician software to help monitor your 970 EVO drive.

Remember when ATI "just worked" and was the best disk cloning and restoration software out there?  Apparently, they are more focused on selling their cloud back up service now. 

Acronis needs to fix their software so it can back up NVMe SSDs to ANY external drive (especially external USB or Networked drive), allow the user to replace their NVMe SSD drive with a new empty unformatted NVMe SSD and restore the new drive with the backup without having to jump through all kinds of hoops, such as having to buy a PCI card to mount the new NVMe SSD so the current NVMe SSD can be cloned to the one on the PCI card.

David, welcome to these public User Forums.

Acronis can backup NVMe SSD's to any (supported) external drive, including network drives, and can also restore such backups to a new NVMe SSD, but there are considerations when the drive is the OS boot device, as the BIOS SATA mode used by the disk controller has to be correct or else the restored drive will not boot.

Any cloning solution by definition requires that both the source and target drives are connected simultaneously, as otherwise cloning is impossible to perform.  Backup & Restore / Recovery is able to achieve exactly the same outcome as using Cloning without the need to buy any PCI adapter for NVMe drives.

Acronis needs to fix their software so it can back up NVMe SSDs to ANY external drive (especially external USB or Networked drive), allow the user to replace their NVMe SSD drive with a new empty unformatted NVMe SSD and restore the new drive with the backup without having to jump through all kinds of hoops, such as having to buy a PCI card to mount the new NVMe SSD so the current NVMe SSD can be cloned to the one on the PCI card.

It does all this already.  

Unfortunately, there are too many unknown variables in this thread - more complaints than help.  It's impossible to provide help, without details.   And this isn't meant to offend anyone here, or be a "fan boy" type response either.  It's not that Acornis (or other backup/restore products) can't or don't work.  You will see these same issues in other competitor forums too - I use several backup tools for redundancy, testing and comparison and am active in different forums as well.

The issue is that technology is changing and bios are more complicated and not standard like they were with good old pure legacy/MBR systems.  We now have systems that are legacy + UEFI capable, but different bios settings are needed to get different results. Vendors don't all use the same firmware or standard configurations.  Just to boot external media, some machines need to have secure boot disabled.  And others need CSM legacy mode enabled just to boot external media even in UEFI mode!?!!!  Then there is the issue of newer PCIe NVME drives that have their own requirements - like being required to be GPT in order to be recognized as a boot drive and having the necessary IRST drivers in rescue media to see them if the bios SATA mode is set to RAID or RAID-on mode - and this is nearly 99% of the time on systems that customers are receiving from the manufacturers with these drives pre-installed.   Compound that with people wanting to use them withe Windows 7 as a boot drive (which isn't supported until you apply non-standard hotfixes), or that people want to migrate legacy/MBR SSD's to PCIe's, there is more work needed to be done on the user-end to prep the bios and/or the OS to support these transitions than the "good old days" where it just worked.  It can't just work, when there are manual settings in the bios that need to be configured at times.

Additionally, cloning has limitations - like not being able to clone a 512kb emulated drive to a pure 4K native drive (no idea if this is the case for anyone here or not), but these are starting to be more mainstream now too.  Also, cloning can fail if the system has to reboot and use the LInux recovery environment - especially when PCIe NVME drives are involved since most manufacturers suggest using RAID mode and this requires IRST drivers.

And... WinPE doesn't always read the drive letters the same as the original OS either.  WinPE gives the temp OS X:, but beyond that, the drives can show up with whatever drive letters they get - usually based on how fast they respond to the temp OS when they POST.  It doesn't matter what drive letter they show up as in WinPE.  The original Drive letters will be reflected when you restore the drive and boot to it later.  

I've had great success migrating from SSD to PCIe NVME for a few years now.  And recently, cloning from an older 256GB NVME to a newer 512GB NVME and then again from that one to a different 500GB NVME. It just took me some time to understand my bios and what settings my firmware required in order to ensure rescue media was always being launched in UEFI mode (which is another requirement for successful restoral and bootability on systems that support both legacy and UEFI mode).

This is all getting complicated as Bob says. Some of his comments are specific to systems with Intel CPU and chipset. 

Not sure if all Intel systems require IRST drivers as the more basic chipsets do not support raid. So check out the chipset support.

My aging Ryzen 7 does not need IRST drivers as it uses AMD chipset - basic Windows RE media recognises M.2 drives (both on main board and on PCIe add on cards). The chipset/UEFI supports raid, but I have had no reason to try it out.

Just a few facts:

1. Windows 8 thru 10 support NVMe drives natively, no additional driver support needed either.
2. Windows 7 does not have support for NVMe drives natively.  A hotfix was issued by MS to address this issue however, the hotfix either must be applied to an existing installation of Win 7 or injected into the install files of Win 7 installation media prior to installation to provide support.
3. M.2 is simply a new connector standard for attachment of chip based (SSD) hard drives
4. NVMe drives will only work on PCIe interfaces.  They will not work on SATA interfaces.  For Intel platforms NVMe drives MUST have the SATA interface mode set to RAID to enable PCIe lane mapping for the NVMe drives to use.  That is a function of the CPU/Chipset.  If RAID use is desired then an Intel RAID driver must be installed or available for the NVMe drives to function after the creation of a RAID array.
5. AMD Ryzen supports NVMe drives for Windows platforms same as above.
6. AMD Ryzen also supports PCIe interface RAID volumes but requires the latest BIOS revisions be installed along with RAID-Expert drivers (AMD specific) and the machine bios must support NVMe/PCIe RAID as well.

Without the requirements above being meet you will have issues migrating from the SATA standard to the PCIe standard.  It is necessary that you understand the requirements of each interface, platform, and specific machine bios implementations for a successful migration.  If you meet these requirements True Image or any other similar product can make the migration successfully.