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Cloning fails to see or lock disk

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On a Windows 10 laptop that boots off a 1 TB 3.5" SATA HDD I added a new M.2 PCIe 250 GB disk and was able to format it and create a document.  I would like to clone the old disk and so on a tower PC running ATI 2019 I created an ISO recovery file called AcronisBootablePEMedia and used Rufus to create a UEFI bootable pen drive from which I booted the laptop.  When I attempt a clone I get the message:

"Unable to lock the disk. Boot your computer from a Linux-basedbootable media, and then try again."

So I went back to the tower running ATI 2019 and created recue media AcronisBootableMedia.ISO which I wrote to my USB pen drive and booted from.  I tried to clone again and now get the message:

"Unable to continue. This utility is designed to work with two or more disk drives."

Any help in understanding what I have done wrong would be appreciated.

 

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Eugene, I would not recommend cloning your laptop HDD by connecting this and the target drive to a different (tower) PC as this will result in device drivers for the different hardware used on that other PC.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

Take a look at topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I documented the process that I used when upgrading my laptop NVMe SSD drive using Backup & Restore.

That's helpful, thanks.  I did not appreciate that there was a difference between having the source disk connected via SATA and removing it to load in a USB caddy.  Actually I still don't really understand why this should be the case but never mind.

The next challenge will be to enable a dual boot arrangement, at least temporarily, so I shall be trying to understand BCDEDIT for that.

Thanks again Steve.

Eugene, you don't need to setup or enable dual-boot for this scenario, just to boot your laptop from Acronis Rescue Media on either a USB stick or DVD along with have the original HDD connected externally via a USB adapter.

You will not be booting from the HDD when connected externally, just using it as the Source for the Clone operation.

My personal preference is to not use cloning but rather to use Backup & Recovery which doesn't need the original HDD to be connected at all but set aside safe away from any changes etc.

With Acronis, you can create a Survival Kit external boot & storage drive where you can store a backup image of the HDD, then boot from that drive with the new NVMe M.2 SSD installed for the recovery operation as per my earlier link where I did this for my own HP Omen laptop.