Posted on 01/08/2023 8:56:26 PM PST by Paul R.
AH! A PC hard drive transfer question. Great timing.
I have six hard drives (HDDs). Recently upgraded my OS (C) drive to an SSD.
Used Acronis software, and it worked great.
Now my H drive is bogging my system down, and I just received another 2TB SSD to replace it.
Shouldn’t be that difficult to clone a non-boot OS drive, right?
Sorry, I am having a hard time describing how one uefi partition cannot be written correctly on a new drive while the original uefi partition is active. This is a security feature in newer systems.
You are wasting your time cloning. Just install your fresh 256 GB SDATA M.2 and install Windows Ten into it. Get a fresh start.
Now before you do this, save your essential files from the 64 GB eMMC onto a flash drive or USB external storage. Then place them onto the 256GB drive (In Documents, perhaps) after Win Ten has been installed.
I suspect there is a 128 GB limitation in the BIOS/Motherboard for that tiny M.2 board.
Suggest an 128GB or better yet, sell that N22 on Ebay (etc.) and get a laptop that supports windows 11 and much larger storage. Windows 10 is going away.
I use a USB 3.0 to 2.5" Hard Drive cable and HDD. Yes bootable and yes backup for multiple systems.
If you use 4 USB 3.0 to HDDs, you can have one Grandfather and 3 son backups.
Yes, I've been told that about USB flash drives need to be plugged in periodically to keep them alive.
I suspect there is a 128 GB limitation in the BIOS/Motherboard for that tiny M.2 board.
Suggest an 128GB or better yet, sell that N22 on Ebay (etc.) and get a laptop that supports windows 11 and much larger storage. Windows 10 is going away.
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Right on that limitation. He should get a refurb laptop at Dell. About $300.
https://tinyurl.com/2wktmvbz
Or buy on Ebay. I see loads of great 17.3” laptops of Ebay after Christmas.
Windoz Ten is OUT! All mine use Windows 11.
What are you doing with H:? Page File? Lot's of writes?
Heavy writes will kill an SSD. Have you optimized H: lately?
It’s old, full, and has lots of iTunes stuff in it.
If you perform an "image" clone on a TPM encrypted drive, it will only be readable by the system with the TPM that encrypted the "source" drive.
Should be pretty easy. But if your “H” drive is just a data drive you could probably just copy it and then remove the old drive, rather than having to use cloning software.
So, just plug the new SSD into the MB, format it for my system, then just copy everything from the “H” drive to the SSD? They’re both 2TB capacity.
Right. But, here I am not moving anything to a new platform.
It does occur to me that I did not try to copy / paste any individual files from C: (the eMMC “OS” drive) to D: (the new SSD). (My tests on “D” were copying a few files onto it from a USB stick, and then opening them, then deleting the copies.) But, in the past I’ve moved files from C: to a micro SD card I’d put in the laptop’s micro SD port semi-permanently for data storage, with no problems, and ditto for files transferred to a USB flash drive in any of the USB drive ports.
It's just the cloning software that fails, it seems, despite it being fine on several of my other machines.
*However, I've not actually tried putting over 128 GB of files on the M.2 drive while installed in the N22, which is the only home this M.2 has seen. But, again, the source disk and specifically Volume C seems to be the problem for the cloning software.
I got a good deal on a Dell 5490 w/ Win 11 on a 256 GB NVMe drive, and an i7-8650 CPU a bit B4 Christmas. I upped it to 16 GB of DRAM and added an Internal 256 GB SATA M.2 drive for data storage, the page file (shouldn’t get used much), etc. That replaced my HP ProBook which died (no video output internal or external at any time, even @ initial boot-up.)
The N22 is for when I need something even more portable or I am doing something “lesser” in parallel (probably on FR while eating lunch or something like that - hahaha. Well, ok, that’s a light workout for even the N22.)
So far, Win 11 is not too bad (though to be honest, in many ways I like the ol’ Win 7 Pro GUI better.)
Setting up a new machine w/ a fresh OS install (not to mention all the programs I use) is a lot of work, however. Program installs go FAST on the 5490, but there’s usually still a lot to do in the way of OS and programs settings, maybe installing custom dictionaries in the wordprocessor, and so on. From past experience, I’ll be occasionally running into those issues on the Dell for at least several months...
Heck, I still have a (quick) Win7 Pro desktop machine I’m typing this on right now. On it I limit web browsing to only very safe websites. Otherwise it does everything else I need out of it. And, it doesn’t nag me about updates, run any risk of an update crash / temporary disabling of the machine until I can restore it, etc. (Yeah, that - an update crash that killed Windows) - has actually happened to me twice. Not on this machine, though!)
Cloning alleviates most of those issues.
(It occurs to me that the only MS OS’s I don’t have some version of on some working machine are Win 8, Win ME, and any of the server specific stuff. Although... the Vista laptop is hopeless - I may try getting into Linux on it, someday.)
So, I’m partially between someone like you, and the people who’d still be using Windows 1 if it could be made to work decently for web browsing. ;-)
I think it’s more than “need to be plugged in” — I believe the data has to be rewritten. Maybe someone has come up with a flash drive “refresh-files” utility...
When Macrium failed to work properly on my recent SSD to M.2 conversion, I used EaseUS Todo with success. It handled the hidden partitions and allowed me to expand the boot partition easily.
That’s why I run Ubuntu in a virtual machine
Yes, I have several virtual machines set up with various operating systems. But I run Ubuntu in a standalone installation, on bootable USB. I am running Ubuntu Studio on a Sandisk Extreme microSD card in a USB 3 adapter. The Extreme card has very good read/write speeds for not much money. I doubt that a lesser card would perform very well with this operating system.
Ubuntu Studio is extremely good because it comes with a bunch of useful applications right out of the box and the Plasma Desktop by KDE is amazing and easy to configure. On my laptop a standalone installation makes full use of the GPU which is a real challenge to get working properly in a virtual machine If you have not tried this flavor of Ubuntu out I would highly recommend setting up a live installation on a fast USB drive and checking it out.
Are you logged in?
Sorry, FR protocol.
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