ADATA SSD migration woes

I recently bought three ADATA 2.5″ SSD drives to install into customers laptops. The reason for this, is that these modern SSD (Solid State Drive) drives are much faster than the older HDD (Hard Disk Drive) mechanical drives. The three laptops were different brands.

Each SSD was placed in turn, in a “USB caddy” which allows me to easily transfer the data from the HDD to the SSD. The process is called “cloning” and involves making an exact copy of the HDD information on to the SSD.
Two of the drives were 240GB capacity and the third was 480GB.

I always use EaseUS ToDo backup software to perform the “cloning” process of transferring the data from the legacy HDD to the new SSD. I have never had any problem. The EaseUS software works inside of Windows. Happily, the first migration to one of the 240GB drives went without a hitch.

Now the fun starts: when I performed the second migration to the other 240GB SSD, the software kept giving a “sector” write error after the cloning procedure. The cloning process had failed! Not to be defeated, I repeated the cloning process a few times but the error continued.

Out of desperation, I decided to give the free ADATA migration tool called Acronis Trueimage that came with the SSD a go. This software works differently in that it performs the cloning process outside of Windows. After setting up the cloning job task, you are asked to reboot the computer. However, in my case, because the SSD already had been partitioned the first time around, the laptop kept trying to boot from it. Rather than mess with the laptop’s BIOS to change the boot order, I temporarily turned off the drive caddy. When I did that, the laptop started to boot into the Acronis software as expected, giving me time to power up the caddy.

After the cloning process was completed, I swapped out the SSD for the HDD and I was very relieved to see that the laptop now booted up and showed the expected speed increase.

Now onto the 480GB SSD. When I put this into the caddy, the drive could not be seen by the EaseUS software or on the Windows File Explorer! This was strange to me as the two 240GB drives had no problem being visible to Windows 10 operating systems on each laptop, right out of the box.
This problem happens because the drive has not been formatted at the factory and needed to be initialised. A quick trip to the Windows 10 disk management tool allowed me to make this drive visible by creating a “simple volume partition”.

I was then able to successfully clone the third HDD and needless to say, we now have three very happy customers!