Can't clone drive using Macrium Reflect..??

JustAnotherSaver

I bought a WD Blue SSD 500gb to upgrade my laptops HDD as the starting time was getting on my nerves.

Installed M.R.Free this morning. Selected clone disk underneath my main drive. Selected to clone to the new drive. Kept pressing next.

It got as far as this:

My laptop has been performing perfectly fine so i'm not sure about this reading error.

I have the new SSD in a USB drive enclosure. The laptop 'sees' the drive. I had to go in to disk management and format it first but it shows in Computer.

debitcardmayhem

Have a look at S.M.A.R.T. data https://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how-to-see-if-your-hard-drive-is-dying/

Neil_Jones

If you're able to, you'd probably do better to clone it on a desktop PC with the drives connected inside and boot off an appropriate CD for cloning.  Not only would it be faster it would be more reliable.  USB on a lot of laptops is particularly flaky especially when connected devices start sucking a lot of power (as would be the case if you're writing to them for a sustained period) so the error may be a false pretence.

debitcardmayhem

Neil_Jones said:

If you're able to, you'd probably do better to clone it on a desktop PC with the drives connected inside and boot off an appropriate CD for cloning.  Not only would it be faster it would be more reliable.  USB on a lot of laptops is particularly flaky especially when connected devices start sucking a lot of power (as would be the case if you're writing to them for a sustained period) so the error may be a false pretence.

But the USB is the output device and an SSD

Neil_Jones

debitcardmayhem said:

Neil_Jones said:

If you're able to, you'd probably do better to clone it on a desktop PC with the drives connected inside and boot off an appropriate CD for cloning.  Not only would it be faster it would be more reliable.  USB on a lot of laptops is particularly flaky especially when connected devices start sucking a lot of power (as would be the case if you're writing to them for a sustained period) so the error may be a false pretence.

But the USB is the output device and an SSD

The hard drive doesn't make any difference.  The enclosure probably will.  Especially cheap and cheerful ones.  Fine to update a text document on occasion but you pour gigabytes of data through them and sooner or later they don't want to know.

JustAnotherSaver

Yeah it will be a cheap enclosure. I wasn't paying top dollar as i wasn't going to use it a lot and i figured that one for 10x the price would be like when you buy these £100 HDMI cables - you're just getting ripped off.

No?

Also i had a look on YouTube before i even started and people seem to be able to do it via this method fine enough. Obviously they're doing or using something different to me.

Neil_Jones said:

If you're able to, you'd probably do better to clone it on a desktop PC with the drives connected inside and boot off an appropriate CD for cloning.  Not only would it be faster it would be more reliable.  USB on a lot of laptops is particularly flaky especially when connected devices start sucking a lot of power (as would be the case if you're writing to them for a sustained period) so the error may be a false pretence.

Ok now before you answer this question I just have 1 favour to ask .... assume you're speaking to someone who has never seen a computer in their life, because i can see from a mile off that this could easily end up with me getting drowned in a sea of jargon.

So .... how exactly do i do that? What hardware/software do I need to do that?

I have various drives connected to my PC which i can disconnect to connect up the laptop main HDD and also the destination SSD.

I assume i wont be able to boot to the laptop HDD on the PC as the drive will possibly have a hissy fit that it's not connected to 'it's' hardware (the laptop)?? So how would i go about it exactly?

Before i checked back in on this i defragmented my hard drive on the laptop (think it said 20% fragmented).

I then opened up Acronis True Image Home 2011 and checked if it had a clone disk feature - it did.

So i've currently got it connected up attempting that. These things never go straight forward so i fully expect it to fail now. I just hope it doesn't take the HDD with it.

EDIT: Nope, Acronis didn't work.

Thinking about it, would i simply leave my main SSD connected in my PC, disconnect all others, connect up the laptop HDD and the destination SSD.

Then open Macrium on my PC, select the laptop HDD as the source and the destination SSD as the SSD and then let it do its thing, nothing more nothing less?

grumpycrab

JustAnotherSaver said:

...Thinking about it, would i simply leave my main SSD connected in my PC, disconnect all others, connect up the laptop HDD and the destination SSD.

Then open Macrium on my PC, select the laptop HDD as the source and the destination SSD as the SSD and then let it do its thing, nothing more nothing less?

That's almost what Neil suggested (but he suggested a clone boot disk); will your PC boot if you disconnect all others?
Oh, you ignored person above asking about SMART data. Could be a fault on the laptop drive.

Neil_Jones

I was going to suggest something like Clonezilla or similar software that you can download as an ISO file and burn to USB/CD, boot from that and then follow the options to clone the drive.  In other words not through Windows.

I've never had any success cloning anything to/from drives when Windows is running even if its on two separate drives that Windows doesn't even drive letters assigned to.  I have more success doing that sort of stuff outside of Windows, although that may have more to do with the fact historically the only way to do it before NT based solutions was outside of Windows and that's how I've done it ever since.

Heedtheadvice

As per Grumpy's last statement. Refer back to Debit's post regarding SMART!

Error 9 is what it says - a read error. That is not a write error to the SSD but an error reading the already installed Hard Drive. That is why Debit posted.

It has nothing to do with usb or the new SSD. Neil is mistaken this time IMHO.

You will notice in your first post that initial partition clones have been successful and it is a read of a different part of the hard drive has failed.

MR knowledge base gives further info on what to do. It mentions the same read problem during backup but the error you have is the same read cause. It gives ful info and links to explain. It requires your hard drive to be fixed using the inbuilt windows checkdsk facility.  See https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=23397407#content/view/23397407

There will be part of the disk that is duff and that process should effect a work around (a very common situation) if it can. If that does not work try the disk manufacturers similar disk utilities (such as downloadable from Seagate or WD). Failing that MR has an option to ignore the error but that will mean you just do not copy over the bad sector and so loose whatever is on it. If it is the op system then that can be repaired afterwards but if it is a bit of data you have lost it, clone or no clone.

Footnote: This demonstrates the value of having separate backups to recover from such errors!! Do you have one? If not lesson learned?

P.s. I agree a PC with direct connected drives rather than laptop and usb is the better option but the latter should work.

JustAnotherSaver

When the laptop finally decides to stop 'cleaning up' which it's been doing for the past hour or so (page before Windows even opens up) i can get round to trying out this SMART thing. Until then i'm at the mercy of time. I'm not confident it will stop though and i suspect it may be hanging and i'll just have to pull the plug. We shall see. I'll give it a bit longer yet.

I had Clonezilla put to me but i took a look and it looked too techy for my liking. I like click this, click that, hit done and put your feet up kind of things. Clonezilla looked like you needed some knowledge on the topic so i left before i even started.

Someone else tried swaying me with this thing called Daz loader as a solution or something like that. From what they were saying i can install Windows without needing a key which to me sounds pretty suspect and i'm not too much of a fan of that idea. I don't want to turn on the laptop one day to find out it can't be accessed because of it.

Regards backup - there isn't anything majorly significant on the laptop which is why i never really backed it up. All i'd lose is time. I'd have to install a load of programs again but that's about it.

jsmith9

As above it looks like a read error on the laptop HDD.

Probably a silly question but have you run disk error checking on the drive? For each logical drive (C, D etc) rt-click on the icon, properties, tools and then run disk check.