Clone SSD to new SSD
Author
Discussion

toohuge

Original Poster:

3,501 posts

247 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
All,

I am trying to clone my windows 10 boot drive to a larger ssd.
I have downloaded Macrium, however I get a message suggesting that I need to restart and enter windows PE - I follow that, then after a restart, macrium launches and the I get the following error dialog:
xmlandmapvalidate failed and that's it.

Anyone know what's going on?

Thanks

trumptriple

211 posts

162 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
I'm afraid I can't help much but I had a go at doing this recently. I tried using Acronis cloning software and I had to keep rebooting Windows and I couldn't get it to work. So I downloaded Macrium Reflect and it worked perfectly.

My suggestion would be to perhaps try another cloning software. Acronis, EaseUS Todo, etc.

Sheepshanks

41,267 posts

150 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
Random thought - is it failing because the drive is encrypted?

toohuge

Original Poster:

3,501 posts

247 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
Thanks - I've tried EASEUS and I get this error:

Failed to find the specified disk

along with an error code that doesn't show up in google...

FourWheelDrift

92,364 posts

315 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
Have you gone into disk management and set up the new disk by allocating it the space and creating a volume that can be seen and written too?

You can't clone to a blank SSD that has not been setup first.

toohuge

Original Poster:

3,501 posts

247 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
FourWheelDrift said:
Have you gone into disk management and set up the new disk by allocating it the space and creating a volume that can be seen and written too?

You can't clone to a blank SSD that has not been setup first.
Yes - I am trying to clone it to a larger SSD that I've already got installed and working on my machine.

geeks

11,806 posts

170 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
People still clone drives? What is this, the 90's? Just do a fresh install!

Mr Pointy

13,421 posts

190 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
toohuge said:
Yes - I am trying to clone it to a larger SSD that I've already got installed and working on my machine.
I don't think you can do that - you'd have two bootable disks mounted. You have to attach the target disk to a USB port using a USB to SATA adapter cable:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=usb+to+sata&ref=n...

FourWheelDrift

92,364 posts

315 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
geeks said:
People still clone drives? What is this, the 90's? Just do a fresh install!
Because he's wanting to move Windows to a new drive he's wanting to keep all the installed applications, photos, documents, reg files for games installed on other drives most likely too and it will take longer to reinstall or copy them over than just doing a fresh install of Windows.

Edited by FourWheelDrift on Tuesday 14th April 10:50

Mr Pointy

13,421 posts

190 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
geeks said:
People still clone drives? What is this, the 90's? Just do a fresh install!
There are good reasons for cloning a disk if you have customised the setup. It would take me hours to replicate my configuration.

geeks

11,806 posts

170 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
FourWheelDrift said:
Because he's wanting to move Windows to a new drive he's wanting to keep all the installed applications, photos, documents etc.. and it will take longer to reinstall or copy them over than just doing a fresh install of Windows.
Mr Pointy said:
There are good reasons for cloning a disk if you have customised the setup. It would take me hours to replicate my configuration.
Nah! That's what backups and restores are for..

FourWheelDrift

92,364 posts

315 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
Don't assume everyone has backups.

geeks

11,806 posts

170 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
FourWheelDrift said:
Don't assume everyone has backups.
Then they should sit in the corner and think about what they've done hehe

toohuge

Original Poster:

3,501 posts

247 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
How might I do a back up restore?

Just to give you an overview of the system:
C: 120gb ssd
E: 240gb ssd

and another new ssd.

Is there a way I can create a backup of C and restore it onto either e or one of the new drives?

Mr Pointy

13,421 posts

190 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
toohuge said:
How might I do a back up restore?

Just to give you an overview of the system:
C: 120gb ssd
E: 240gb ssd

and another new ssd.

Is there a way I can create a backup of C and restore it onto either e or one of the new drives?
As I said I don't think you can do it when the drives are mounted; the only way I've ever known it done is using a USB adapter cable. Read the Macrium knowledgebase articles as they are very useful.

Mr Pointy

13,421 posts

190 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
geeks said:
FourWheelDrift said:
Because he's wanting to move Windows to a new drive he's wanting to keep all the installed applications, photos, documents etc.. and it will take longer to reinstall or copy them over than just doing a fresh install of Windows.
Mr Pointy said:
There are good reasons for cloning a disk if you have customised the setup. It would take me hours to replicate my configuration.
Nah! That's what backups and restores are for..
We weren't talking about backups & restores, you said "just do a clean install". if I'm starting from a clean Win 10 install a backup won't restore my custom AutoCad configurations nor will it move the Outlook .ost file location to the D drive & mount the .pst files into Outlook.

Of course I take disk image snapshots as a backup, but restoring one of those is not a "clean install".

Penelope Stopit

11,209 posts

140 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
geeks said:
People still clone drives? What is this, the 90's? Just do a fresh install!
Of the same opinion

toohuge

Original Poster:

3,501 posts

247 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
Mr Pointy said:
As I said I don't think you can do it when the drives are mounted; the only way I've ever known it done is using a USB adapter cable. Read the Macrium knowledgebase articles as they are very useful.
Ah ok...

I've created a disk image... it's saved on my installed e drive. I'm now using the media creation tool to create a bootable usb. Am I correct in thinking that I should be able to install a new ssd in place of the original c drive, restart the computer and boot from the usb and then restore from the image on the currently installed e drive?
Hmm just read that it won't carry all the personal information - to give some context - I am trying to upgrade a machine that has a spinning hdd to a ssd - however on the machine is some software with a bunch of configurations etc. and databases that I don't want to lose and can't see a way to effectively backup in this whole process.

Edited by toohuge on Tuesday 14th April 11:56

FourWheelDrift

92,364 posts

315 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
That all sounds like a ball ache. The way I cloned a 120GB SSD boot drive to a 512 NVme (because it was easier and faster to do it this way) was I had both installed as they would always be, no USB cables or other workarounds.

Mounted NVMe into the M2 slot on my motherboard.
Booted PC.
Created partition on NVMe
Ran EaseUS
Choose to clone from current boot SSD to empty NVMe
Let it do it's thing.
Rebooted PC
entered BIOS
changed boot order to NVMe first
Rebooted
Beer.

Nothing was lost, as long as it was now the new C drive all shortcuts to other drives worked.

"Failed to find the specified disk" error on EaseUS means it failed to get the OS version info of your current Windows boot drive. The other error you got from Macrium mentions validate. Do you have an activated Windows 10? What version is it? Have you run all updates for it?

hutchst

3,727 posts

127 months

Tuesday 14th April 2020
quotequote all
toohuge said:
Ah ok...

I've created a disk image... it's saved on my installed e drive. I'm now using the media creation tool to create a bootable usb. Am I correct in thinking that I should be able to install a new ssd in place of the original c drive, restart the computer and boot from the usb and then restore from the image on the currently installed e drive?
Hmm just read that it won't carry all the personal information - to give some context - I am trying to upgrade a machine that has a spinning hdd to a ssd - however on the machine is some software with a bunch of configurations etc. and databases that I don't want to lose and can't see a way to effectively backup in this whole process.

Edited by toohuge on Tuesday 14th April 11:56
You can mount a disk image as a VHD to access all the data in it if you just need to copy the files to your new systen SSD.