SSD Installation

I would like to replace my 1TD HD with a 1TB SSD. How do I install the SSD and clone the HD?

Is this on a laptop?

You might look at these articles to see if they will help you.

This is on a desktop PC.

Scott Christensen

Have you ever installed a hard drive before? If not, you should probably google replacing or adding hard drives to a desktop pc. Once you’re comfortable to do this, then you can install Acronis (if you are using a WD SSD drive, only) and clone your desktop drive to the SSD Drive.

However, you must keep in mind that the SSD drive needs to be large enough in capacity to “receive” the data from your original system drive.

I swapped my 1 TB hard drive with my DVD drive and installed the WD 1TB SSD in place of the HD on my desktop. I’ve loaded the WD Acronis software and it recognized the SSD, however, when I try to clone my HD to the SSD, I get a message to restart. How do I get past the restart to clone my HD to the SSD?

I might be wrong but I think Acronis needs to restart the PC to make the clone of the HDD. So…let it restart?

To clarify, I let the PC restart, however, the HD is not cloned to the SSD. I tried this several times.

Now what?

I did, however acronis didnt/won’t clone my hard drive.

Scott

When Acronis restarts your PC, to the best of my memory, it’s cloning the drive and I think it indicates it’s doing so and displays some sort of progress message. If you’re not seeing that and it just reboots to windows then something isn’t right. Check your settings in Acronis maybe there’s something amiss there. Has the SSD been initialized? Can you see it when Windows boots?

Is your old drive working properly? You might try doing a scan for errors or if it’s a WD drive get their data lifeguard program and see if it says the drive is OK. LIFEGUARD

I would just do a new custom install to the new SSD and be done with it. But that’s just me. Might not be good for your situation.

This process make me think also when I did the same job as you two weeks ago.
I upgraded my laptop (HP) with new M.2 SSD in this way:
I used my own Aconis (not WD version) to create bootable backup partition on one old external USB HD (not SSD) with same capacity as my new SSD M.2 (1Gb). I also created bootable rescue media on USB stick with the help of Acronis itself, so I can boot machine from it. After creation was done, I replaced old SSD with new one. After that, I booted laptop from bootable rescue media on USB stick. Laptop started in Acronis environment and then I used image created before on USB HD as the source and new SSD as destination for RECOVERY task.
Be reminded that maybe you need to go in the BIOS to set USB as first boot option.
After recovery is done and everything is OK, you can make new partitions as you wish with Windows itself or with the help of other software. I used free EASEUS Partition Manager Personal and Windows Disc Management (Shrink volume, etc, etc,etc…)
Everything vent OK.

Update: Loading some generic cloning freeware from CNET worked perfect! I’m good to go.