How to clone when you have two hard drives installed in your laptop?
This software appears to be tailored towards laptops/desktops with a single hard drive, given all the warnings (too late!) about disconnecting the second hard drive. This seems to me rather last century, given the fact that most laptops and desktops have secondary storage space now-a-days.
And why would the warning about a second device being connected not be part of the instructions of the software itself? I needed to read it in the forum after the attempt, which failed.
And even after I had disconnected the hard drive, the cloned OS still refused to function. So what do I do now? Format the Crucial SSD drive and try another attempt? Or get other software? Any recommendations?
The laptop is a 17r inspiron 7720 with two hdd bays.
Memocrat, welcome to these User Forums.
Sorry but too little information to be able to advise you on this question.
What is on your two disk drives?
Which drive are you attempting to clone?
What dependencies exist between the two drives?
Will the cloned drive be a 1:1 direct replacement for the original drive?
How are you attempting to do the clone?
Are any of these drives dynamic or RAID?
Have you made a full disk(s) & partitions backup of both drives before doing anything else?
ATIH 2017 is certainly capable of doing what you want but it is your responsibility to ensure that you use the application in such a way that you do not lose any data in the process.
The topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this!!! was written because of the numerous users coming to these forums who tried to clone without understanding the risks involved.
"This software appears to be tailored towards laptops/desktops with a single hard drive, given all the warnings (too late!) about disconnecting the second hard drive."
I suspect there is confusion here. ATI 2017 does is indifferent to the number of drives a PC/notebook has. What is important is that once you have cloned to a 'new' drive, that only one of the new drive and the source drive is attached to the computer; both disk will have the same disk signature which can cause all sorts of havoc, as well as difficulties in getting the system to boot up properly. Many users clone to a new HDD that is in a USB dock or a USB enclosure, then once the cloning is done, swap the drives over. You can of course clone to a new drive that is internal - I have done that a few times, but then you need to disconnect or remove the source drive.
Ian
I did a clone about 2 years ago from an IDE Drive (Win 7) to a SATA drive which I upgraded to Win 10, and I can boot successfully from either drive by selecting the boot device on boot up. Something may have happened in the boot signature when I cloned.
Used refresh on Windows 10 to clean the hard drive, which left only the OS and some drivers on the old HDD. Then I wanted to clone this OS unto the new SSD, which I wanted to use as the new 'primary device'. The older drive for storage. (old 1 tb, new 525 gb) The cloning procedure using Acronis apparently worked, although I wasn't present for the end. When I got back the computer was off.
I turned it on and the windows 10 password access menu started flashing uncontrollably. Had to turn it off repeatedly. Apparently this is caused by having both the HDD and SSD in the laptop. Then I went into BIOS and by accident found the solution: return the bios to its default values. The system booted up, but the SSD wasn't recognised in disk management.
When I booted the system again the SSD was shown in my bios. When I went into Windows, I saw the drive listed in disk management. Apparently it finally registered. But not as the primary device.
Then I tried changing the boot order (which is almost impossible, given the user unfriendly BIOS this system has), which invariably led to either the OS not being recognised or the flashing effect.
I then switched both drives. The SSD is now in the primary bay, but it still won't initiate the OS. When I put the HDD back, the OS initiated.
In Acronis the SSD is now listed as the primary hard drive. Most likely because it's still in the primary bay, but it's not acting as the primary OS.
Dependencies: don't know.
The clone was done by means of the Acronis software.
The drives aren't RAID, so I suspect they're dynamic?
Acronis does not work with Dynamic disks, so that would not be the problem.
I suggest you try the following. Disconnect the old HDD, so only the new SSD is attached. Then run Windows recovery media which will hopefully allow you to get the PC to boot from the SSD. If you have not made recovery media (most people do not) then you can use the Windows installation disk ... although most name-brand PCs do not ship with them. If you have a Dell PC you may be able to download the Windows installation disk from the Dell site.
Ian
PS For some reason I assumed you were using a Notebook, but nothing in your post to suggest this is the case. Another seniors moment.
Back to basics...
1) does the old (original HD boot if it's just in by itself)? If so, remove the SSD and boot to the original drive.
2) attach the new SSD via a USB to SATA cable ($10 on amazon) or pop it in an external hard drive enclosure
3) wipe the SSD using diskpart or a free version of minitool parition wizard (which has to be installed unfortunately since they now only let you
4) Shutdown the PC completely (use command prompt and shutdown/p - this will ensure a full shutdown and not a fastboot shutdown which is really just hibernating and can lock features on the disk).
5) start the computer from your acronis rescue media, don't boot into Windows. on a Dell, tapping F12 repeatedly as soon as the system turns on should give you a one time start menu. Pick the recovery media - I'm assuming UEFI here and not legacy - Dells will typically give you both options but this is a key point for a recovery or clone as how you boot the media determines how the disk will boot later.
6) clone the original hard drive to the external SSD
7) When the clone is done, completely shutdown the PC so it is powered off completely.
8) remove the original hard drive, put the newly cloned SSD into the original hard drives slot and connector
9) boot the computer and go straight into the bios... ensure that the boot order shows the SSD as the primary boot option.
10) now try to boot to Windows
Bios' can be finicky, simply resetting the bios to defaults may not help if you had an original legacy OS but cloned or restored in UEFI mode... you'd need to change the bios to UEFI mode then. You cannot revert from UEFI to legacy (although this process can let you do this, it won't ever be bootable). This is what gets a lot of people even though the software does it's job, there's still some bios tinkering that may need to happen. You can avoid issues with teh process itself by only working with one internal drive at a time. Sure, it would be nice if we could pop two in and just do this and leave them both in, but because each bios and firmware is different, they behave differently when they see two "IDENTICAL" drives and don't know how to process them at the hardware level of the bios.
As mentioned above, I'd recommend taking a full disk backup image and restoring that image to the new drive... 1) it gives you a safety backup in case something should go wrong - for whatever reason. 2) it is a less finicky process to the OS/drives. Clone is nice, but it has it's qwerks because of the bios behavior and those can be avoided by taking a backup and restoring that backup instead.