We attended a customer that was having a problem cloning his old HDD (Hard Disk Drive) to a new SSD (Solid State Drive).
The programme that he was using to do the Cloning was the excellent Acronis application. The Acronis tools were installed on a USB stick, which the customer used to boot the computer. The Cloning should be done outside of Windows, to minimise the risk of corrupting the data on the HDD. Needless to say before you attempt to Clone, you MUST back up all of your important information from the HDD, in case something goes wrong during the Cloning process which leaves you at risk with losing all of your data.
The customer had opened the computer and replaced the HDD with the new SSD which is the correct way to do this. You must first swap out the HDD with the new SSD, or the Cloning will fail since the boot OS won’t be installed correctly.
He had then installed the HDD in an external USB caddy and had it plugged into the laptop.
He had then plugged the Acronis USB tool into another of the computer’s USB sockets and booted the computer. Because the old HDD was plugged into the computer, the computer attempted to boot from the USB caddy. Windows will not boot from an external drive so the computer immediatly shut down.
I instructed the customer to unplug the caddy, leaving only the Avast USB tool plugged in.
He then booted the computer and saw the Acronis menu. After seeing this he could then plug in the HDD caddy and choose option 2 on the menu to lauch the Acronis True Image suite.
After the tool was installed, he chose the Clone tool but didn’t see the new SSD showing in the list of detected drives.
I told him that he must first shut down the Acronis tool and unplug the HDD caddy to make sure that it was not accidentally erased during the next process.
Then boot up the computer to the Acronis tools but this time choose the “Add New Disk” option.
When he did this, he saw his new SSD but it showed as “Uninitialized”. This is why the Clone tool couldn’t see it. I instructed him to highlight the new SSD and click Next.
After he did this, I once again told him reboot the computer to the Acronis menu. Then again, plug in the caddy.
After he did this and chose the Clone tool, he could now see the SSD!
Finally he was able to carry on and Clone from his HDD to his new SSD. Needless to say, the new SSD has greatly increased the speed of his computer and he is very pleased.
