HD Cloning - Macrium or Acronis?

ThisIsWeird

vacheron said:

The issue may be that it seems you are trying to clone the new SSD while it is installed in a USB caddy. This will prevent have the new SSD from reading a lot of the SMART data the way it would over a SATA port. (I assume that is is a SATA rather than an M.2 interface)? It will also need to set up the new drive as a system partition and set that partition as bootable.
Can you install both drives in the computer simultaneously using a SATA lead rather than having one in a USB caddy?
As your source drive is also a 2.5" unit I am guessing that it may be a laptop, so possibly not?
As others have said, you may need to reduce your original disk partition size first in order to do a direct clone of your older and larger drive onto your newer, smaller drive, but IIRC, Magician can do this too.

Thanks all - if I need to shrink my original drive, I'll get back to you!

Yes, Vach, it's a laptop, an old Lenovo Z575 (2012?) and seemingly doesn't have an extra slot inside for storage - no PCI-e or M.2 - or else I'd have just added one of these alongside instead. 'Crucial' only shows 2.5" available as a SSD upgrade. Perhaps I should have a wee look inside just to confirm?

Yes, the 2.5 SSD is currently in a wee USB case, so I see what you mean about this causing issues - it cannot clone via a USB?

I do have this connecting setup too, but i guess no better since it also uses USB?

So, a 'clone' just ain't going to be possible via USB? That would leave the option of a fresh install of W10 on to the fitted SSD, and then reload all her progs and files. Hmm, from experience, that will take hours - ain't going to happen :-(

bob2302

ThisIsWeird said:

So, a 'clone' just ain't going to be possible via USB? 

No it just means you can't check the health with that particular adapter. It won't affect the cloning.

Checking the health seems to me to be a largely pointless thing to do. If the device is healthy you proceed. if it's not you get on with it before it fails. 

ThisIsWeird

bob2302 said:

ThisIsWeird said:

So, a 'clone' just ain't going to be possible via USB? 

No it just means you can't check the health with that particular adapter. It won't affect the cloning.

Checking the health seems to me to be a largely pointless thing to do. If the device is healthy you proceed. if it's not you get on with it before it fails. 

The Samsung Magician wouldn't even check the health of the installed Seagate HDD. It wouldn't allow the selection of a partition. It didn't even recognise the existence of the USB-connect Samsung SSD.

So, I guess I'm going Macrium. My only concern now is, do I need to change the 'size' of 'anything', before I ask it to clone 109GBs of the 500GB HDD on to the 250GB SSD?!

Ta :-)

HillStreetBlues

Computer management - Disk management- right click disk that needs to be reduce,  - Shrink Volume  -Enter the amount of space to shrink by (the number should be highlighted in blue if 266240 (this give you a bit to play with)  is a lower number that what's highlighted enter 266240, then click on shrink.
If the highlighted number is lower than 266240 return to forum with that number.

ThisIsWeird

HillStreetBlues said:

Computer management - Disk management- right click disk that needs to be reduce,  - Shrink Volume  -Enter the amount of space to shrink by (the number should be highlighted in blue if 266240 (this give you a bit to play with)  is a lower number that what's highlighted enter 266240, then click on shrink.
If the highlighted number is lower than 266240 return to forum with that number.

Thanks, but I don't understand.

I'd assumed I'd be shrinking the existing volume (on the 500GB HDD) down to what should neatly migrate to the new 250GB SSD? At the moment, the 500GB HDD is showing as 109GB used. What would I shrink it to - whatever the available size is of the SSD?

I'm astonished that cloning software cannot work this wee conundrum out! It looks at the source HDD, and ditto at the recipient, and sizes the partitions to match. Pffft.

Paradigm

Disk Genius will do this quite easily using the "system migration" tool as long as the source disc has less used space than the new disk.

https://www.diskgenius.com/how-to/clone-hard-drive-to-smaller-ssd.php

ThisIsWeird

Paradigm said:

Disk Genius will do this quite easily using the "system migration" tool as long as the source disc has less used space than the new disk.

https://www.diskgenius.com/how-to/clone-hard-drive-to-smaller-ssd.php

Thanks.

I have D-G, so will give that a shot first - thanks for the link

ThisIsWeird

To confirm - if I wish to copy everything, all 109GB, which is the OS, other Apps, and all files - to literally clone ALL the content on to the SSD - I select 'migration'? Ta.

Paradigm

Yep, it worked for me more than once. Give it a go, if it doesn't work for you all you've lost is time!

ThisIsWeird

Argh!

Losing my mind. I've done this before, but I'm questioning everything since it ain't my lappie...

Where does the D-G get stored? How can it replicate itself...!