cloning old to new system
I am building a new computer system, I want to clone my old Hard drive to a larger SSD drive and change to a new MB w/new I5 cpu. is ther any documentation that will walk me thru the correcr process of installing the new drivers for the new computer, and completing the image install, to do this. I am new to True Image 16.
Thanks for your help
Kerry
Kerry, yes, it is possible, and no you don't remove drivers first - universal restore as mentioned in the youtube video by Enchantech is how you "generalize" an OS after deployment to make it compatible on different hardware.
However, there are other caveats too. Most likely, your older system is Legacy/MBR (I'm guessing though since it's not mentioned). A new motherboard will likely be UEFI/GPT and may support Legacy/CSM/MBR (most do, but not all). You will need ot make sure to configure the new bios to support legacy/MBR/CSM mode and disable secure boot. Also, you need to check the old bios settings for SATA MODE (RAID, SATA, AHCI) and make sure it is set the same on the new system to match. Windows 10 is less picky about this but Win 7 is dependent on it and Windows 8.1 is not as forgiving as Win10.
So Acronis recovery and then running Universal restore takes care of the OS generalization, but you'll still have to do some configuring and troubleshooting to get your new bios setup and configured to allow the OS to boot as well.
Thank you for your help, all good inforation. I'll build the system and let you know how it goes.
in what part of the bios would I find config settings for legacy/MBR/CSM ? I've looked thru the book on configuring the bios and have found nothing on this.
Thanks Again,
Kerry
Those settings would be found in the Boot section or tab in your bios.
What's your motherboard make/model and firmware version at?
The new one is MSI Z170a Gaming M7, firmware unknown /I5 cpu. I tried using the universal boot I made from True Image 2016 today, from USB thumb Drive, and on a dvd rw, neither worked, I kept getting a reboot again, or put bootable info ( not word for word ) in correct drive. I tried off the dvd first then from USB dive, and or dvd with boot priority of those being 1 and 2 , it didn't work same message. I did find andset to legacy/UEFI some where in bios, but I can't tell you in what screen.. I did also make universal boot disk in SATA in bios of old machine, and in the new machine there was only RAID and AHCI to choose from. Im going to try to make a new bootable bisk with the old machine set in AHCI, and see if the neww MB will detect that with new mb set to the same AHCI. thanks for your responses.
Question, board has 2 slots for M2 modules SATA or PCIe, these modules did not com with MB, do I mave to install an M2 module for MB config to work?
Hi Kerry,
I don't think I completely follow - you mean that you have two adapters on your board that are adapters?
Start with the basics and work your way through the steps...
1) What was the original system OS install - Legacy/MBR/BIOS .... OR.... UEFI/GPT?
2) What was the SATA MODE in the bios of the original system.. AHCI, SATA, or LEGACY? Make sure to set it the same on the new system.
3) Depending on #1 above, boot UR in the same manner using your boot override menu or one time boot menu on the new system. Then specifically pick that option for booting the media (UEFI or legacy).
Did you do this as well when starting the clone. I'm not sure it matters for the clone process, but it does for the backup/restore process so I would be sure to start the recovery media in teh same manner as teh original OS was installed to be on the safe side.
After your clone, instead of putting it in teh new system, can you remove teh original source drive and put the cloned drive in the orignal PC and boot it successfully? If not, then there's no sense trying to get it in the new system just yet.
Personally, I would skip the clone. Take a full disk backup of your original drive and save it somewhere else. Then restore that image to the new drive, but make sure that when doing the restore, you boot your media in the correct mode to match the original OS intall (UEFI or legacy). Remove the original drive from the original system and replace it with just the new one and make sure it boots. If it does boot, then put it in the new system and attempt to boot it. If it doesn't boot or find the OS, BIOS settings are probably the issue. If it starts to boot and gives a BSOD, then run UR on the drive and hopefully it boots after that without much more to do.
Kerry,
You appear to be having trouble navigating your way through the new board bios. This is understandable as new boards offer an EZ Mode and an Advanced Mode. To change and adjust the settings outlined in this thread thus far it will be necessay for you to use the Advanced Mode.
Reference your motherboard manual begining on page 48 for details. Advanced mode instructions begin on page 53. Use information in this section of the manual to set the board boot mode properly, disable Secure Boot if necessary, set SATA mode, etc.
The M.2 slots on board are for the new form factor PCIe storage devices and have no relevance in this discussion due to the fact that you are working with standard SATA storage devices.
I have gone in and set boot priority and Sata, I have not found how to disable secure boot yet,and the manual I got with the Z170A Gaming M7 board
only goes to P46 and then changes langue. It does not cover advanced mode other than to tell you how to get there, but I've worked my way thru it.
what I dont understand is how to find out if the orignal OS install is Legacy/MBR/Bios or UEFI/GPT, can you please define these for me so I might understand, where I can find this information. I am going to try again this afternoon to boot the new system.
Thanks again,
Kerry
The Sata mode is AHCI, what I dont understand is how to find out if the orignal OS install is Legacy/MBR/Bios or UEFI/GPT, can you please define these for me so I might understand, where I can find this information. I am going to try again this afternoon to boot the new system.
Thanks again,
Kerry
I just found this, thought you might use this in the future to help streamline others process
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/29504-bios-mode-see-if-windows-boo…
Hi Kerry,
I am attaching a .zip file which contains the manual for your motherboard in PDF format. Please reference the pages I mentioned earlier. I have no idea why the manual that came with your board falls short unless it is a quick install guide rather than a full manual which wouldn/t surprize me!
As for the link to the Win eight forum, I and the other MVP's here are aware of that post as well as many others on the net that outline those procedures. The issue is that they work for some and not for others. In your case I would think they were successful since you have an enthusiast motherboard you are working with. Might I ask what your results were? I am suspecting UEFI, correct?
the original system OS install is Bios
SATA is AHCI
I did disable the HD boot in the sorce system, and used CD as 1 Priorty and the UR disk did not work soI'll try to remake it I guess.
you said to do a full disk back up? do I use true Image or windows back up to do this? when I put it in the new system How do I install the correct
chipset drivers and others so as not to cause a problem with the new board?
The backup should be made using True Image. Make sure your bios is set for Legacy boot since your existing install is a bios (Legacy) install. Boot to the recovery media you have and run True Image to first restore the backup to the machine. Then reboot again into the recovery media and run the Universal Restore tool. This process will install basic generic drivers into the image you just restored to the machine so that it will boot to the OS on the system drive. Once you have completed the steps through the Universal Restore process boot into you machine bios and select the main system disk as the first boot priority, save and exit. Machine should boot into Windows were you then can install the appropriate drivers for the new board.
finally got thru the process today, but not as described. My old sys. is win.7 Professional 64 bit with a 128 Gb ssd.
I am upgrading to this system because I would like to start getting into aerial video and 3d mapping with my drone. I set bios to AHCI, and boot mode to Legacy+UEIFI as the old sys. was BIOS and SATA/AHCI. I created the backup to a USB HD then rum the bootable media, true image 2016, only the options were on a black screen. I insatlled the backup image, It failed the first time, ran it again with success only when it rebooted it booted straight into Windows even with the boot priorty still set as 1.CD, 2 Usb, 3 HD. So I ranthe OEM driver disk, and the install folder, and ran it, then extended the source DR to it's full 480 GB. It's an ssd too. when I was done It would not boot up again. It just read something like " reboot or put bootable media in and hit any key. I retried this whole process 2 more times and while I had the regular ACRONIS screens in the bootable media, and the backup restore was successful it never worked when I was done. I'm not sure whats going on, or where to go from here. extending the drive out to it full cap. wouldn't cause problems would it? is there a way to restore the backup to the full capacity of the new drive? This souuldn't be this hard. Should i try taking the bios back to default, or clearing CMOS, and reconfigure before trying again?
Hi Kerry,
It sounds like your Acronis bootable media is being booted as UEFI/GPT (black screen and white letters). If the original OS was legacy/bios, you want ot boot the media as legacy/bios too. This will be a blue background with GUI icons for the menu.
I'm not familiar with your board, but pressing F12, F1, Del or ESC after reboot (one of them - try F12 first) should get you to your one time boot menu where you can specifically pick the option to boot Legacy USB or UEFI USB. Select Legacy USB and do the restore again.
After that, I think you'll be OK.
Extending the full drive capacity in Windows disk management after you've been able to boot your restored image should not caus a boot issue unless you're using some kind of third party encryption (we use McAfee Encryption and if the drive paritions are modified, it changes the disk signature and makes it unbootable).
If/when you get the bios restore to boot (which I believe you will be able to), reboot it a few times to make sure it works each time. Then go into control panel >>> disk management and select the C: drive. Right click and "extend" the parition and select all of the available space and that should extend it out to fill the capacity of the new disk. Then reboot and make sure it still boots.
that's how I extended the drive. in the proxess of picking the source dr. when starting backup and picking the destination drive there's a box towards the bottom of the screen that you check to copy or maintain disk signature, should that be checked? thanks again.
Hi Kerry,
By selecting to keep the disk signature, you're bascially spoofing the original drive hardware ID to the new drive. In most cases, this is not necessary. However, by doing this, licensed software, that is registered to a specfiic drive, shoudld remain licensed. When not selected, licensed software may prompt for a license key or require you to transfer the license to the "new pc" since it's detected as new hardware. Whether you choose to maintain the disk signature or not, resizing the partition should not impact the bootability of the machine if the machine was booting fine just prior to extending the capacity. If it is, this is happening after the image restore or clone process and may be somethign else going on in Windows. You could try a safe mode boot and see if that allows it to boot and if so, check the Windows logs and then try a regular boot (if it doesn't work, go back into safemode and check logs again). If safe mode works, but not regular mode, it is probably a driver issue or a startup application compatibility problem.
FYI.. have you checked out the KB article on cloning (https://kb.acronis.com/content/56634)? There are some limitations when cloning drives with different sector sizes. If you run up against an issue like that, you should be able to take a full disk backup image and restore the image instead of using the clone method. I personally don't clone, because it is a little more restrictive in nature with the sector size limitation (most SSD's are now using 4K sector size but many spinning drives 2TB and smaller are 512Kb sector... sometimes it works, sometimes not, but it's not supported). By taking an image and restoring it, you don't have this limitation, plus I like having a backup image to fall back on as cloning does not have a fail-safe built in should you accidentally clone in the wrong direction or something else happen during the process that is unexpected.
One such example that people often run into is when they start the clone from within Windows. This changes the OS bootloader on the primary Windows disk and replaces it with Acronis temporarily. However, if the bios is not properly configured, Acronis may fail to boot and this will prevent the bootloader from being automatically switched back to Windwos and then you may end up with an unbootable machine. So, as a rule of thumb, I also don't start cloning from Windows (although, I barely clone anyway) and always use my offline bootable recovery media to start the clone proces, since it will not modify the OS disk bootloader in anyway when it is launched from the offline bootable recovery media (vice when started from within Windows and does modify the source disk bootloader then.) Probably more info than you we're looking for, but wanted to give some extra info and options in case you continue to have boot issues after a successful clone and then go back and extend the partition out.
By having you bios set to Legacy+UEFI when you are selecting your boot media in the bios you should see two different entries there for the same boot media. One will or should have (UEFI) in the name and the other should not. If you are choosing the one with UEFI in the name then you are booting the machine in UEFI mode and that is resulting in the failure you are experiencing. Select the other entry for the media which does not have UEFI in the name and boot to that. You will get the colored screen that Bobbo mentions upon boot. This entry may be at the very bottom of the list of bootable devices in your bios so make sure you are looking through the entire list when looking for it.