Trouble cloning HDD in an HP x360 to SSD

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Engr62

Gawd
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Mar 24, 2015
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I'm trying to clone the 1tb HDD in a friend's HP x360 laptop (Windows 10) to a 240Gb Samsung SSD Plus. I downloaded "Acronis True Image WD Edition Version 3.2" through the Samsung SSD Dashboard program. I have the SSD drive attached to the USB 3.0 port via a USB to SATA cable. I've tried these steps to clone the drive.

1) When I try to run the Acronis exe file to install it, it says something to the effect of "since there is only one drive in the system, it can't install."

2) I then tried booting a copy of Clonezilla from an external USB CD drive attached to another USB port on his laptop. Clonezilla let me select his HDD as the source disk and his SSD as the target disk for cloning, but then couldn't complete the cloning process since the source disk is larger than the target (I remembered that Clonezilla had some limitation, but didn't remember the exact limitation until I tried this).

3) I had a purchased copy of Acronis that I had been saving for another system migration in the future, but I decided to install it on my friend's laptop to try this. I get the same result as step 1 above -- Acronis can't see the SSD drive.

I've gone into Disk Management with the SSD attached, and it shows up as a 240Gb drive that is unallocated, so there seems to be nothing wrong with the cable or SSD.

I've read that I need to go into the BIOS and make the SATA ports "hot swappable", but there is no such option in HP's BIOS (it's a very feature-poor BIOS).

If I shrink the HDD partition to be smaller than the SSD, I think I can then use Clonezilla to clone partition-to-partition, but I'm afraid of screwing up his Windows installation if this doesn't work.

Can I pull his HDD, put it in an enclosure, hook both his HDD and SSD to my desktop computer and do the clone? If so, what software will do this?

Thanks
 
Engr62 said:
Can I pull his HDD, put it in an enclosure, hook both his HDD and SSD to my desktop computer and do the clone? If so, what software will do this?
Click to expand...

Yes, Macrium Reflect may do this with the Free version.
GParted can also do partition cloning (and shrink it on the target) but I'm not sure if that'll include the stuff in the boot sector.
 
Did you try the included Samsung Migration tool? It has worked for me every time.
 
Thanks for all of the suggestions. I made a mistake when I made the original post--the SSD I was trying to clone to is a SanDisk and not Samsung. It was supposed to work with the free version of Acronis, but I just couldn't get it to work.

I ended up putting his HDD in one enclosure, the SSD in another enclosure, attaching them to my desktop via the USB 3.0 ports and performing the cloning with the Acronis WD free version (I have a WD hard drive in my desktop, so it installed on it). The Acronis software allowed me to clone a larger HDD to a smaller SSD. The cloning went smoothly (Finally!), and his laptop is up and running with the SSD now.
 
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