Question How to clone an Optane+SSD drive without disabling Optane

[Ed LaCrosse]

Hello all,

I've been searching all over the internet to figure out how to replace the Optane+SSD in my Dell Inspiron 13 7390 2n1 laptop running Windows 11 with a new SSD (without Optane). The laptop is 5 years old. By way of background, my Optane+SSD has both Optane and SSD on the same physical card, and that card fits into a single M.2 slot. I've come to understand from my research that you cannot disable Optane with this architecture.

Meanwhile, I'm getting notifications that my SSD is failing and needs to be replaced and, most recently, I've also been getting notifications that Optane is "degrading" and I need to disable it to avoid data loss. But I can't disable Optane...

I've read in numerous articles and posts that you must disable Optane before cloning a drive in order to flush any data in Optane back to the drive. If you don't do that, then some data might be lost in the cloning process and the new, cloned drive might not "work". I haven't tested that, but it concerns me.

I'm looking for anyone who has successfully migrated from Optane+SSD to SSD for a steer on what I need to do. I have been taking backups of my data regularly and I'm working on cloning the drive right now (with Optane enabled, in case that might work). I'm about ready to order a new SSD plus an enclosure. My plan is to clone the existing drive to the cloud, recover it to the new SSD using the enclosure, replace the Optane+SSD with the new SSD in the laptop, then try to boot the laptop (with fingers crossed). If this fails, my only option appears to be reinstall Windows with a "blank" SSD installed in the laptop. I lose all my applications and settings that way, so I'd be looking for a way to not lose it all or to get it back economically. I'm also not sure what happens with the install Windows process when there is no copy of Windows on that new drive. Will I have to pay to license Windows 11 again?

I've been to the Dell and Intel community forums and haven't gotten much help beyond learning that you can't disable Optane on my drive.

I'd appreciate any feedback on my plans, in particular any recommendations to simplify or reduce the cost of the process.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

[evermorex76]

Perhaps perform a backup to an external drive, using free or paid backup software (which is good to have and use normally anyway) then swap drives and restore it to the new SSD. Since it's running within Windows it should be able to perform the backup without any issues. You can also tell the software to do a "verify" after the backup to ensure all the files are readable. (And you've got the old drive to put back in if it fails.)

Your Windows install would just activate when you enter your Microsoft account information, where the license is stored, if you did have to do a clean install. If you clone, you might get a warning about activation anyway, and all you really have to do is hit the Activate Now button or whatever and it verifies itself.

I think the cloning process OUGHT to work fine under normal circumstances anyway, as long as you don't try to do a bit-for-bit copy, but I've never tried to do it with an Optane+SSD. I imagine it would work the same as one of the old hybrid SSHD devices.

 

[Ed LaCrosse]

Perhaps perform a backup to an external drive, using free or paid backup software (which is good to have and use normally anyway) then swap drives and restore it to the new SSD. Since it's running within Windows it should be able to perform the backup without any issues. You can also tell the software to do a "verify" after the backup to ensure all the files are readable. (And you've got the old drive to put back in if it fails.)

I'm using paid backup software for my backups. I'm not sure why, but I'm struggling a bit to clone the drive. The laptop has gone down twice while the backup was taking place. I'm now trying to clone the drive for the third time.

Once I clone (if I can do so successfully), I can recover the image from the cloud to any drive I'd like. My plan would be to recover it directly to the new SSD using the enclosure, then replace the old Optane+SSD with the new drive and proceed to see if it will boot. I'm missing what you mean by "swap drives" above, or maybe I'm planning to do what you suggest?

Thanks for your response. If I make any progress, I'll post up here.

 

[fzabkar]

I would think that caching would be transparent to the OS. That is, if you clone the logical drive, the OS would read each logical sector from the appropriate physical location, without being aware of which drive is the host for that physical sector.

What do you see in Disk Management?

 

[Ed LaCrosse]

I would think that caching would be transparent to the OS. That is, if you clone the logical drive, the OS would read each logical sector from the appropriate physical location, without being aware of which drive is the host for that physical sector.

What do you see in Disk Management?

I'm hopeful that you're right re: transparency. Right now, I'm leaving the laptop alone while the cloning process is underway, so I don't want to look at Disk Management. I'll have a look later and report back. What am I looking for there?

 

[fzabkar]

I have no experience with Optane setups, so I'm wondering how the drives are combined. Are they set up as a single logical drive?

 

[Ed LaCrosse]

I have no experience with Optane setups, so I'm wondering how the drives are combined. Are they set up as a single logical drive?

I haven't looked at Disk Management, but I've been to Crystal Disk Reports several times recently. There, it shows two drives, one of around 512 GB and the other about 32 GB, the latter being associated with Optane. But only one drive shows up in Windows File Explorer. I'll have a look at Disk Management after (I hope) the clone job finishes.

 

[evermorex76]

I'm missing what you mean by "swap drives" above, or maybe I'm planning to do what you suggest?

Yes, that's what I meant.

That's interesting that it shows you a second drive but you're not meant to access it. Seems like begging for trouble from someone thinking they can format the thing, but maybe that would actually work fine and Optane would just not function as a cache, but you'd have a 32GB (or 28) really fast partition (compared to the old slower SSDs that were using Optane). But it still should all be transparent to the OS, it just asks for a logical address and the drive pulls it from wherever that exists, just like the translation table on an SSD.

The word "clone" by the way has a specific meaning, which is having one drive copying directly to another. You're just doing an image-based backup, not a clone. A clone would save time since you don't have to do two steps, and don't have to wait for the image to sync to the cloud, and restoring from the cloud to the SSD will be much slower. I assume you are saving the image file onto the new SSD and syncing that to the cloud?

You may simply not be able to do a backup or clone if the Optane+SSD has degraded far enough. I've been able to clone HDDs and SSDs that were having problems with no errors, and in a few rare cases I was able to click the "ignore errors" button when a warning popped up and didn't have any problems, but it sounds like you've gone beyond that. It's possible that degradation of either component in this type of drive actually makes the problem worse than a regular SSD. You're probably going to end up needing to just install everything fresh, and you can put the Optane+SSD in the enclosure to copy off any data that wasn't being synced to cloud storage or a cloud account.

 

[Ed LaCrosse]

Yes, that's what I meant.

That's interesting that it shows you a second drive but you're not meant to access it. Seems like begging for trouble from someone thinking they can format the thing, but maybe that would actually work fine and Optane would just not function as a cache, but you'd have a 32GB (or 28) really fast partition (compared to the old slower SSDs that were using Optane). But it still should all be transparent to the OS, it just asks for a logical address and the drive pulls it from wherever that exists, just like the translation table on an SSD.

The word "clone" by the way has a specific meaning, which is having one drive copying directly to another. You're just doing an image-based backup, not a clone. A clone would save time since you don't have to do two steps, and don't have to wait for the image to sync to the cloud, and restoring from the cloud to the SSD will be much slower. I assume you are saving the image file onto the new SSD and syncing that to the cloud?

You may simply not be able to do a backup or clone if the Optane+SSD has degraded far enough. I've been able to clone HDDs and SSDs that were having problems with no errors, and in a few rare cases I was able to click the "ignore errors" button when a warning popped up and didn't have any problems, but it sounds like you've gone beyond that. It's possible that degradation of either component in this type of drive actually makes the problem worse than a regular SSD. You're probably going to end up needing to just install everything fresh, and you can put the Optane+SSD in the enclosure to copy off any data that wasn't being synced to cloud storage or a cloud account.

Thanks for sticking with me on this.

Optane seems to have been a failure by Intel. Dell seems to have taken their bait and built quite a few computers with it, some with physical Optane drives distinct from a SATA drive or SSD and some, like mine, that put the whole package on a single card. I don't have a clue how it works. I don't know a lot about this stuff, and I take your points about transparency and I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I do know, though, that there are lots of posts out on the net about the need to "disable" before cloning. We'll see what happens.

I think I've managed to "clone" the drive successfully in that I have an image file in the cloud and on an external hard drive. (iDrive creates an image on a local disk then uploads it to the cloud as part of its "cloning" or "full machine backup" processes.) I won't know if it works or not until I get a new drive. I think iDrive will let me recover the image from the local hard disk but maybe not. If I have to recover from the cloud, I understand it will take awhile.

In any case, I won't be able to test if what I've done "works" for a few days while I wait for a SSD to arrive. I know things will be out of sync even if the cloning was successful, but that won't be hard for me to manage. If I wait too long, I'll try to produce another image file.

As noted briefly above, I use iDrive for backup, including "cloning" and they distinguish between what they call a disk "clone" and a "full machine backup". I really don't understand the difference, but each ends up with an image file. I do take your point.

I'm not sure what caused my laptop to crater while trying to create the image the first two times, but it did run to completion this third time with no problems noted in any log file.

Thanks again.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you see your file/folder structure if you open the image file with 7Zip?

Alternatively, you can mount the image in read-only mode with OSFMount.

Still another option is to open the image with DMDE, assuming it's a byte-by-byte clone.

What is the size of the image file?

 

[evermorex76]

Can you see your file/folder structure if you open the image file with 7Zip?

Alternatively, you can mount the image in read-only mode with OSFMount.

Still another option is to open the image with DMDE, assuming it's a byte-by-byte clone.

What is the size of the image file?

Backup image files aren't necessarily anything that can be opened by other applications. Even a bit for bit image will be compressed by the application into their own format. Some do use compatible formats, like a VHD file, but for example the .imgx file created by Macrium Reflect just contains one big file with no extension, and the only way to examine it would be to extract THAT file which probably is NOT readable by anything else. A quick search indicates iDrive uses a proprietary format as well.

iDrive probably includes a "mount" feature (often added to the file context menu) that lets you browse the contents of a backup file. It might even allow you to mount it as a bootable image that you can add to a virtual machine. I only have limited, old experience with iDrive and thought it was crap at the time.

iDrive's use of "clone" and "backup" in odd ways annoys me as a technician. Their "clone" is just a backup image of specific selected drives (or maybe just the OS drive, to restore only the OS and those apps and files on that drive if it gets corrupted; iDrive is primarily pushed for businesses with multiple volumes), while "machine backup" means they image everything on the computer to an off-site or off-computer location, so that you can recover it in case of total physical disaster. They're both just a backup to everyone else, where all drives get selected automatically and can be deselected and you can choose where to put it. The word clone is not normally used when creating an image file that could be accessed over and over again.

Man, I miss Norton Ghost.

 

[dev_cyberpunk]

iDrive's use of "clone" and "backup" in odd ways annoys me as a technician.

iDrive clone is rsync copy while backup is tar copy.

I don't mess with 3rd party clone software. Instead, I use a Linux os boot and the dd command. Because it clones the drive exactly.

The only reliable copies of cloning an optane boot drive can only be done with a usb boot and not booted from the optane.

 

[JayGau]

I would try to make an image (not a clone) with either macrium or clonezilla, then remove the optane, install a regular nvme and push the image to it. Windows may not boot, but let it keep trying until it goes to recovery mode and once there, choose to boot in safe mode. After that, reboot normally. It usually works.

 

[dev_cyberpunk]

for the restore, I would run a linux install disk and exit out of the install to that desktop, launch gparted and initialize the drive in gpt. Then restore the image.

Question is how you going to restore a copy if its on a NAS in cyberspace?

Another thing is rsync copy and tar copy can successfully copy an Apple OS or Linux, but I think Microsoft has to binary copy because of certain they deliberately named that is too long to be copied by those methods. Clonezilla and some others might have figured out a work around to that weak copy protect strategy.