- May 19, 2011
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A customer wanted to swap out their nearly-full 128GB SSD for a 256GB model. As I had used EaseUS Todo Backup (free) recently and successfully in a similar-ish situation, I thought the cloning technique should work just fine.
Complication #1: My "ICY DOCK" USB 3 enclosure handles just about any drive I throw at it (including the 850 PRO), no problem but no 860 PRO has ever worked with this enclosure.
Ok, that complicates things a bit. I then remembered that I had taken apart a Seagate portable USB enclosure a while back, used it with another drive without issue, then it sat in a drawer unused and un-drived for some time. Stick the SSD in that. Nada. Try another HDD in it. Nada. WTF. A problem for another time.
Fine. I pulled out an old Nehalem rig I have spare, did a quick Win10 64 install on that, then plugged both the old and new SSDs into it and told the EaseUS program to do a drive clone. Despite the fact that it wouldn't let me alter the destination partitions (and annoyingly the original SSD had a Lenovo recovery partition on the end of the drive, so not a simple job of potentially just extending the main partition to use the rest of the new drive's capacity), I thought that it gets me a step further and I've used third party partition editors before.
Complication #2: Laptop BSOD's instantly with the new SSD in.
Complication #3: When attempting to boot the laptop from DVD, the laptop REALLY wants to boot into Win10 non-UEFI setup mode which I only twigged after trying to do boot sector related diagnostics. With the amount of time wasted on that and the limited time available I thought I'd better try something else as the drive clone blatantly did not do what it said on the tin (though the "'system drive clone" feature I've found worked fine for me on a previous occasion).
Complication #4: Windows system image restoration didn't work
Then I thought I'd give the Windows 10 'create system image' feature a shot despite the fact that it has never worked for me as a means of transferring an installation from one disk to another (though people here say it works), and on restore that gave me a bizarre long error message basically saying something like that the new SSD wasn't a probable target for restoration.
Screw it, clean install time.
I did however save some time by using a utility I had previously come across but never tried called 'TransWiz' which backs up and restores user profiles (a feature that I find bizarrely absent from Windows, the closest thing being the 'copy profile' function which isn't helpful in this respect nor does it copy the entire profile). TransWiz worked exactly as advertised, no complications (aside from Windows whinging about wonky file associations, probably to do with programs not yet installed on the new installation).
Complication #1: My "ICY DOCK" USB 3 enclosure handles just about any drive I throw at it (including the 850 PRO), no problem but no 860 PRO has ever worked with this enclosure.
Ok, that complicates things a bit. I then remembered that I had taken apart a Seagate portable USB enclosure a while back, used it with another drive without issue, then it sat in a drawer unused and un-drived for some time. Stick the SSD in that. Nada. Try another HDD in it. Nada. WTF. A problem for another time.
Fine. I pulled out an old Nehalem rig I have spare, did a quick Win10 64 install on that, then plugged both the old and new SSDs into it and told the EaseUS program to do a drive clone. Despite the fact that it wouldn't let me alter the destination partitions (and annoyingly the original SSD had a Lenovo recovery partition on the end of the drive, so not a simple job of potentially just extending the main partition to use the rest of the new drive's capacity), I thought that it gets me a step further and I've used third party partition editors before.
Complication #2: Laptop BSOD's instantly with the new SSD in.
Complication #3: When attempting to boot the laptop from DVD, the laptop REALLY wants to boot into Win10 non-UEFI setup mode which I only twigged after trying to do boot sector related diagnostics. With the amount of time wasted on that and the limited time available I thought I'd better try something else as the drive clone blatantly did not do what it said on the tin (though the "'system drive clone" feature I've found worked fine for me on a previous occasion).
Complication #4: Windows system image restoration didn't work
Then I thought I'd give the Windows 10 'create system image' feature a shot despite the fact that it has never worked for me as a means of transferring an installation from one disk to another (though people here say it works), and on restore that gave me a bizarre long error message basically saying something like that the new SSD wasn't a probable target for restoration.
Screw it, clean install time.
I did however save some time by using a utility I had previously come across but never tried called 'TransWiz' which backs up and restores user profiles (a feature that I find bizarrely absent from Windows, the closest thing being the 'copy profile' function which isn't helpful in this respect nor does it copy the entire profile). TransWiz worked exactly as advertised, no complications (aside from Windows whinging about wonky file associations, probably to do with programs not yet installed on the new installation).
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