Clonning HDD to SSD - no boot

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

My old laptop is becoming rather sluggish and I thought to try swapping the HDD for an SSD. HDD 1Gb SSD is a Crucial 500Mb.

Laptop Acer has 8Mb memory, running Win10. HDD has around 150Mb of data on it.

Using the Crucial version of Acronis, and a USB to SATA adaptor, I used the automated clone option. It ran through the cloning process on screen, finished and I swapped the HDD with the new SSD and switched on. It never got beyond the BIOS, blue screened, with an offer to go into the BIOS. BIOS listed the SSD drive OK.

I then repeated the clone process two more times, with the same result, except once the copying was underway, Acronis disappeared from the screen - just the blue access led flashing on the adaptor, to show data being transferred.

Plugging the drive into a second laptop, via the USB adaptor, I can see all of the files in place on the drive, whereas I could not even see the drive all via the first laptop with USB adaptor.

It seems it have something to do with the MBR, but what? How do I fix it please? Acronis claims to make the SSD ready to just swap.

[chop]

Did you tell the bios to boot off the SSD ?

[Cursitor Doom]

I'm replying to this whilst having to put up with the footie in the background so my concentration is impared somewhat.However, the first thing I would say (won't do you much good now) is that you should have made a copy of your boot sector, the first 512 bytes of your source drive. When you attempt a clone like this, your destination/target drive has a different geometry to the source one, so it's not the least surprising that your new image doesn't boot. You're using Acronis? Don't know that one. I'd use 'dd' in Linux; never fails but you need to be a Linux user to know the pitfalls and potential disaster 'dd' can do if you mix up the source and destination drives. Use it correctly and it beats everything else hands down IMV.

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

The SDD showed up in the boot order as number 2, with Windows as 1 - the same as with the original HDD installed. I tried swapping the SSD to position 1 and it made not difference - still not booting beyond the BIOS.

[Marco Moock]

Am 04.12.2022 um 17:33:55 Uhr schrieb Harry Bloomfield Esq:

If it is an UEFI system, you need to run the boot repair from your windows installation media to create a proper EFI boot entry.

I think you confused GB and MB. Windows 10 can't run with 8MB of RAM.

[Joe]

I hope you have some units mixed up there, Win10 is not going to install in 1GB or run in 8MB. Win95 would have been OK with that.

That looks to be the root of the problem: for some reason, the BIOS is not talking properly to the SSD, even though it can recognise the drive's existence. You might try looking for a later BIOS version: that's always worked OK for me, but there's also always a slight risk of something happening during the critical writing period. Having said that, Acer has a poor reputation for BIOS updates, there may not be any.

I've done this, not with Acronis but with Macrium Reflect, also a free download. I was sceptical, but it worked fine, no need to re-register Windows.

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

It is UEFI and that is one of the things it complains about on the blue BIOS screen, so I will see if I can sort that - thanks.

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

Thanks, something else to look at..

[John Rumm]

Acronis is normally rock solid reliable for this kind of thing. It might be worth doing the clone again but rather than allowing it to auto resize, just have it create an identical layout (i.e. not expanding the partitions to fill the extra free space). Some systems can have difficulty booting if the boot partition is not located under cylinder

1024.

Also make sure to not have it change the partition table type from MBR to GPT or vice versa. (if you are running EFI BIOS, then it will probably expect GPT anyway)

Normally it "just works", but not always. I suppose a faulty drive or USB to SATA adaptor could also be part of the problem.

[Mark]

I also use Macium Reflect its free and so for has worked without a problem.

[chop]

That bit is crucial.

If it was that, you should still be able to see drive the first laptop with USB adaptor.

And that normally works fine.

[Rob H]

+1 for 'dd'

[John Rumm]

One of the attractions of acronis (and other similar tools) is that it can clone a drive but also resize the partitions on the fly. So if upgrading to a larger drive, it can expand the existing partitions to fill the space at the same time. (either automatically or you can specify the new sizes).

OOI, Can you do that in dd while cloning a complete drive?

[Paul]

I just tested the Acronis freebie (I have a copy from 2021). And it did resize the partitions automatically.

[Picture]

Whereas if you do it with Macrium, you need some tricks to get past this result. It did resize C: when making the clone, but then it did not leave itself room to copy the last partition. You can use the button on the page, to manually resize the partition, then do a drag and drop clone of the last partition.

[Picture]

*******

One thing that "dd" does not do, is it does not assign new unique BLKIDs, UUIDs, GUIDs and other disk identifiers when making disk drive copies. There is also not a lot of "automation" for doing this. the automation is embedded in some backup tools. I don't think Clonezilla does that. Clonezilla expects you to clean up the mess. dd does not do it either. Does not fix up the disk drives so the identifiers on the two disks are different.

You don't in fact, want exactly identical copies of disks. You want the data to be identical. You want the identifiers modified so the disks don't get in fights with one another.

dd is great when:

1) You don't trust the platform backup tools, whatever they are.

2) You have damaged file systems and want to make safety copies.

3) ddrescue approach -- reading as many sectors as possible so that just the defective sectors are not copied. Normal tools are not good at that stuff.

But for many other partition management or cloning tasks, other tools are better. A typical power tool, does an fsck or a chkdsk, before it makes a copy of a partition, and it copies clusters or inodes using the disk structures on the verified partitions. This is called smart copying, and clonezilla does smart copy too. But when it comes to VolumeID, DiskID, BLKIDs, UUIDs, and the like, the automation for that is pretty hard to find. Sure, you can sit there for 20 minutes and do command line stuff with a smug look on your face. Great. But that is not what the OP wants.

Part of "dialing in" tools such as Macrium, is verifying that the tool you want to use, fixes that stuff.

Paul

[Joe]

Of course not. The dd program makes a bit-for-bit exact copy. Sometimes you want that, sometimes you don't, in which case it isn't the right tool. Nobody on a DIY group would use the wrong tool for a job...

But there are times when a Swiss-Army-Knife tool doesn't do the job properly, in which case you want a set of low-level disc tools to either fix a nearly-right job, or do it step by step manually if all else fails.

Personally, I would use a purpose-built tool for resizing partitions, either before or after the cloning job as appropriate. The Win10 clone I did was onto a smaller drive, so I resized C: down to fit first. Using the Windows tool, by the way. I try always to use Windows tools on Windows discs, as MS is sneaky.

[Brian Gaff]

How old is your version. I think modern bioses are harder to trick with cloned mbrs. Not done it of late, but it obviously must be possible as an engineer did what you are doing on a desktop. Brian

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

I have just got round to trying Macrium Reflect, the free version, and it looks as if it just simply worked. No need to change anything in the BIOS.

I've also did a bit of research on Acer Aspire ES1 and Crucial sell the actual drive as being suitable for the laptop and well as offering the Acronis software as a download, to clone data from HDD, to a bootable SSD. Shame I just could not get it to work, but now sorted using Macrium.

[Rod Speed]

But True Image does do a bit for bit exact copy if you want that.

More convenient to have that done for you when cloning.

[John Rumm]

Why "of course"?

In spite of using *nix boxen for decades, I have never found the need to use it. Hence the question.

Which suggests that is is probably not the right tool for many jobs then.

Yeah right.

Yup, I can see for making forensic copies that you will then set about with other tools it would be ideal.

The stock widows tools have got better over the years (in that they will allow partitions to be resized), although they still have limitations.

[Joe]

Because it does the job it was written to do, and nothing else. There are partition management tools, both command line and GUI.

I usually only use it to put an ISO onto a USB stick. Absolutely guaranteed not to treat the ISO as something to be put into a filesystem. I've occasionally used it to back up or restore an MBR.

No, it's a Unix tool, it does one thing and does it well. I wouldn't use it to clone a drive, not even a Linux installation, and certainly not Windows.