Hi All I have a question about cloning drives. I just got a NVMe drive, can I clone my current SSD to it and run it on a new motherboard? Secondly can I clone a SSHD to a SSD or will it cause problems? (I want to move my work laptop install onto my new workstation). Thoughts? Problems?
IIRC, cloning a SATA SSD to an NVMe drive can sometimes cause boot problems, not 100% sure without searching t'internet. I considered it recently when rebuilding a new gaming rig but in the end thought stuff it, installed Win 10 1903 from a USB drive and just plugged the SATA SSD into another port afterwards to copy everything I needed across. However, cloning an SSHD to a SATA SSD will be fine, both are SATA.
Awesome! The SSHD is much more important as setting up my work environments again would be a maaaaaaasssive pain!
Yeah, again IIRC, it's to do with the interface and low level drivers, at boot time the NVMe accesses a different driver and part of the BIOS UEFI to boot. I remember installing an NVMe drive on my Z97 m/b when new in 2016 and Windows 10 did not yet have the right driver, I had to add an Asus driver at boot time (remember doing that years ago). After a few more releases of it was fine, the driver came with Windows but in your SSD to NVMe example, Windows will be expecting a SATA driver to boot. There is probably a way to get it to work but is it really quicker than reinstalling? Just remember when doing the SSHD to SSD cloning to use a non-Windows method, e.g. HDClone on a bootable USB stick.
Sort of on this topic, I used driveimagexml to back up a drive but it failed going HDD to SSD - apparently a known issue, something to do with boot sector. Sooooo.......does anyone know of a good cloning tool that will let me just go "copy my disk to that disk and swap them out and everything will work fine as if nothing had changed"? I've got Acronis (free with a Crucial SSD) but haven't used it in anger yet. Maybe that's fine?
If the SSD is the same size or larger than the HDD, you can do this without any extra applications as long as you have an extra drive in the system, an external drive, or a network drive, to store an image of the HDD on: - Use the "Back up and Restore (Windows 7)" tool to crease a system image of the HDD on your extra drive - Boot to Windows recovery (either from the old drive if you still have it installed in the system, or from a bootstick or boot CD) - Restore the created system image to the SSD - Boot to the SSD - If the new drive is alrger than the old, use Disk Management (WIN+X, K) to expand the partition to fill the disk
I cloned my Samsung 830 (SATA) to a 970 evo (NMVe) without issue. I would have prefered to have done a fresh install, but I want to finish revising my thesis first in case it messes up my referencing software.
It's not the thesis itself he's worried about - I'd hope that's backed up in multiple places and in multiple vesions - it's:
I have a copy of everything on two clouds and three different drives. It is the configuration of Word with plug-ins and in particular the configuration of my referencing software that is connected to 1400+ pdf files and updates the references and bibliography in my word documents which I am concerned about. If my referencing software messes up I don't want to think about how many hundreds of hours it could take to fix.
I'm in a similar position with my work environments, so many software configurations that I don't want to have to redo!!!
I'm running Mendeley and I have an error when syncing that they won't help me with. It backs up my references. I don't think it will back up all of my PDF files, and I'm not certain that it will correctly link with the files.
