There is a flaw in the rules here. Acronis is supposed to be used on a WD SSD. I am trying to clone from a generic drive to new WD_Black, but it won’t allow me to. It seems to me there is a flaw in the logic.
Bob
Are you sure the drive is not a fake?
I purchased it from B&H. I believe the block is because I am not running the Acronis FROM a WD drive, I trying to clone TO a WD drive.
Is the new drive installed in your PC or is it in a USB enclosure?
If USB, note from:
- Cloning to external USB drives cannot be done.
Also note:
- A Western Digital drive must be used to install.*
So if installed on your “generic” drive (not WD), then you’re correct.
It’s the drive that came with my Dell 7020. I wanted to replace it with larger and possibly more reliable drive. Currently, the Black is in the second slot in the PC. I am surprised it can’t detect the WD SSD, it seems if you want to upgrade to a WD, you can’t. It seems to be an oversight that it’s only one way, and in my case the wrong way. In addition, I don’t know if it’s a hardware limitation or a WD Acronis thing, but if the machine had only one slot, how would you clone to another drive? Again, if I wanted to replace my generic in my machine, I would put the new SSD in a case, and connect it via USB, then when done, I would swap it with the PC drive.
I have found cloning unreliable so I keep USB sticks with installers on them so when I need to clean up a BSOD problem I can boot Windows installer and install stuff from 128GB and 256GB sticks as needed
I remember I used to be able to install windows over windows and still retain all my data and programs. It does not seem that way anymore. I do have an installer stick, and I ended rebuilding the entire computer. Luckily, I still had most of my downloaded program installers in the download folder and I found most of my keys. But it was still a real PIA. I think for now I will keep the WD Black for data and leave the OEM drive alone. I am assuming Dell would not install a cheap POS on a $1k computer.
I have laptops galore and I use USB sticks to install everything and update the installer stick regularly by copying downloads
Sounds like a ton of work.
It can be brutal yanking a machine out of mothballs to update windows or to install a larger SSD etc some day I might get some more tables and spread them out a tad
It feels as Windows gets more and more fragile as time goes on. Robust and Windows cannot be uttered in the same sentence.
I found Windows 11 has been maintained as witnessed to the large number of system components being replaced. Evidently one problem has cascading effects up and down the API layers.
I use Macrium Reflect Free to backup/clone drives. As the name implies, there’s a free version (vs Subscription). It does allow adjusting partition sizes to expand/contract to fit the new drive.
I use the “Image” backup to my EX4 for my desktops and laptops.
It also allows you to create a recovery drive (CD or USB) to boot and restore the image in case of failure. Typically I create the image backup, then restore the image to the new drive.
As for the “upgrade” to Win11 from WIn10, I had the similar issues on my old Lenovo desktop. It came with WIn7 and I updated to Win10 a few years ago. I did have to update some drivers and reinstall some apps to get WIn10 to work OK. The Win11 jump had too many problems, so I started clean. Reinstalled my needed aps (realized how much garbage I had on my Win10) and restored my data from the backup.
Windows 11 has broad support for even old machines. Drivers are widely on windows update but check in advanced options as some drivers are held back.
