(I tried posting this question in the Acronis Forum, and was referred to OEM support options - which led me here. If there’s a better place to ask this question, I’m happy to ask there.)
In brief
Hello, I’m trying to make sure I’m following the recommended process for cloning my home desktop’s C drive (an older SSD) to a new, larger SSD. After reading through the user manual for Acronis, I’m uncertain about some details.
What I have
I have a 7-year-old desktop with a 120 Gb SSD WD Green 2.5" drive. After those seven years the drive is very full, and we’ve outgrown it. I recently bought a 1 Tb SSD drive (also a WD Green drive, and the same 2.5" size as the original drive). I’ve physically installed it, and can see it in the Disk Management tool within Windows 10.
I’m including a screenshot from Disk Management (below), in case there are details in here that I’ve overlooked. The C drive exists alongside some other partitions, which will be one of my questions later.
The computer also has some larger HDD drives, as you can see in the screenshot. I’m not sure whether they matter for what I’m trying to do.
What I’ve done
I’ve downloaded and installed Acronis True Image for Western Digital, and created two backups: one for the entire system (about 1.4 Tb in size), and one specifically of the C drive. I created these backups while in Windows 10, not while booted from recovery media. These backups are on one of the HDD drives (somewhat obviously, given how little free space is on the old SSD drive).
After taking the backups, I used the Rescue Media Builder tool within Acronis to create a USB stick that’s Win ME based (the “easy” option didn’t result in a USB stick that was actually bootable, for some reason). I’ve updated my computer’s boot order to be able to boot from this USB stick. However, the only way I’ve been able to get the computer to actually boot successfully from this USB stick is by restarting the computer from the “Advanced Startup” option in the System Recovery screen. Simply rebooting, and starting the computer from being powered off, doesn’t result in the computer booting while the USB stick is in place.
After finally booting from the USB stick, I’ve validated the C drive backup, which was successful.
My questions
My first question is whether there’s a trick to being able to boot from the recovery media - because the workflow I describe below isn’t possible if I can only start the sequence while the old C drive is still connected.
Second, assuming that I can boot from the USB stick, I think I’d be at the point where I am ready to start in earnest. From reading the “How NOT to do this” article, I think the next steps are:
- Disconnect the old SSD drive within my desktop. Maybe don’t fully remove it yet, in case things go wrong.
- Boot into the USB stick, and restore the C drive backup to the new SSD drive. Will that bring along the restore partitions and EFI system partition?
- The C drive backup is for a 110 Gb partition, but I’m restoring into a 1 Tb drive. I think I’ll be given the option to make the new C drive bigger… right? This is the whole point of this process, after all.
- …what else? Once the restore process is complete, am I done?
Are there any steps that I’m overlooking? I don’t have whole disk encryption on this computer (unless I’m really forgetting things), so there’s no concern on that front. I’m just worried that I’m overlooking something, and am about to break my family’s computer because I’m not thinking carefully enough.
Many thanks for any advice or perspective that anyone can share…