Question Unable to clone HDD to SSD. Please Help

[Prakap]

I bought a Samsung 860 Evo SSD yesterday. Ever since I plugged it in, I've been struggling to migrate my data from my HDD.

So after watching a few tutorials, I downloaded EaseUS todo and started cloning my C: drive. At first, I was returned with an error that said : Failed to read sector. Please clone using sector-by-sector. When I tried Sector-by-sector clone, it said that the disk didn't have enough unallocated space, which is strange since I didn't make any partitions on my 250GB SSD & my c: drive is just 180GB full. So, I tried with another program called AOMEI Backupper. I was returned with an error215: Too many fragment files on the volume needs to be defragged. So that's what I did. I defragged my drive. Ran both the softwares again. No difference. Then I ran chkdsk on my c drive. No difference. Ran chkdsk again. Still nothing. Today, I found out Samsung had a data migration tool for its SSDs. When I ran that, it returned with the error 303250: Cloining failed. An error occurred during defragmentation. Of course, all of this points towards multiple bad sectors on my hard drive. So I ran EaseUS Partition Surface Test. Turns out I just have 1 bad sector out of 976566264, which is quite normal. Now reinstalling Windows is unfortunately not an option for me since I have multiple very very old softwares (some custom too) to which, I can't get setups anymore. Cloning is my only route, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the real issue is. It's been over 40 hours now and I'm as clueless as I was 40 hours ago.

Thank you everyone in advance for helping.

 

[aldan]

so your ssd is 250gb.how big is your hdd?

 

[Prakap]

so your ssd is 250gb.how big is your hdd?

It's 500 GB. Now I do realize that it's not possible to transfer any data from a bigger HDD to a smaller SSD using sector by sector cloning. I just wonder if there's some other workaround.

 

[Solandri]

It's 500 GB. Now I do realize that it's not possible to transfer any data from a bigger HDD to a smaller SSD using sector by sector cloning. I just wonder if there's some other workaround.

Clone the drive to another HDD that's bigger than 500 GB in sector-by-sector mode. Run chkdsk on the cloned HDD to clear up and filesystem errors. Then clone that HDD to the SSD in non-sector-by-sector mode.

Yeah I know you probably don't have another HDD. But you did ask if there's some other workaround.

Did you run chkdsk, or chkdsk /r? The /r flag (or the "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" checkbox) is necessary to force it to attempt to repair bad sectors.

 

[USAFRet]

It's 500 GB. Now I do realize that it's not possible to transfer any data from a bigger HDD to a smaller SSD using sector by sector cloning. I just wonder if there's some other workaround.

Recent clone tools only care about the actual used space. The target drive can indeed be smaller than the source, IF the data fits.

Cloning into a 250GB drive, your actual used space needs to be below 200GB.

 

[Prakap]

Clone the drive to another HDD that's bigger than 500 GB in sector-by-sector mode. Run chkdsk on the cloned HDD to clear up and filesystem errors. Then clone that HDD to the SSD in non-sector-by-sector mode.

Yeah I know you probably don't have another HDD. But you did ask if there's some other workaround.

Did you run chkdsk, or chkdsk /r? The /r flag (or the "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" checkbox) is necessary to force it to attempt to repair bad sectors.

Yup. I did run chkdsk /r

 

[Prakap]

Recent clone tools only care about the actual used space. The target drive can indeed be smaller than the source, IF the data fits.

Cloning into a 250GB drive, your actual used space needs to be below 200GB.

That is odd. My data usage is in 170s in my HDD

 

[USAFRet]

That is odd. My data usage is in 170s in my HDD

If there's a bad sector on the source drive, it will stop at that point.

 

[olaf]

AOMEI works well in your case, unless as stated above, you have a bad sector. If you are cloning a boot drive , the one you are running windows off currently then you need to find an alternate boot device. I would suggest getting MediCat : (https://gbatemp.net/threads/medicat-dvd-a-multiboot-linux-dvd.361577/) Needs a 32Gb stick as it uses up over 18GB's
Use that to boot the system, you have a portable Windows 10 running on the image, then use AOMEI partition assistant to clone the drive / Partition proportionally.
You will most likely have to fix the UEFI boot partition on the new drive , you can follow this turorial here : (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...s-denied/747c4180-7ff3-4bc2-b6cc-81e572d546df)

 

[Il3mendo]

Did you try to clone with Data Migration from Samsung?

 

[karenjoly]

Cloning the c drive is not a problem with Macrium Reflect Free version as I have done it successfully many times. And as noted, modern cloners handle smaller target disks by using a transfer that only clones sectors that have data, not all the space ( sector by sector).
The bad sector issue may be the problem, may not. I would certainly try Macrium which if nothing else may give a better description of the problem if it runs into one.

 

[USAFRet]

Macrium can indeed clone/migrate the current running C drive. No need for an alternate boot drive of any sort.
It takes a snapshot as it starts.

I thought it was magic the first time I did it and it worked.
But it does work.

 

[captaincharisma]

It's 500 GB. Now I do realize that it's not possible to transfer any data from a bigger HDD to a smaller SSD using sector by sector cloning. I just wonder if there's some other workaround.

yes there is, make an image of the drive instead of a clone.

 

[capd72]

I bought a Samsung 860 Evo SSD yesterday. Ever since I plugged it in, I've been struggling to migrate my data from my HDD.

So after watching a few tutorials, I downloaded EaseUS todo and started cloning my C: drive. At first, I was returned with an error that said : Failed to read sector. Please clone using sector-by-sector. When I tried Sector-by-sector clone, it said that the disk didn't have enough unallocated space, which is strange since I didn't make any partitions on my 250GB SSD & my c: drive is just 180GB full. So, I tried with another program called AOMEI Backupper. I was returned with an error215: Too many fragment files on the volume needs to be defragged. So that's what I did. I defragged my drive. Ran both the softwares again. No difference. Then I ran chkdsk on my c drive. No difference. Ran chkdsk again. Still nothing. Today, I found out Samsung had a data migration tool for its SSDs. When I ran that, it returned with the error 303250: Cloining failed. An error occurred during defragmentation. Of course, all of this points towards multiple bad sectors on my hard drive. So I ran EaseUS Partition Surface Test. Turns out I just have 1 bad sector out of 976566264, which is quite normal. Now reinstalling Windows is unfortunately not an option for me since I have multiple very very old softwares (some custom too) to which, I can't get setups anymore. Cloning is my only route, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the real issue is. It's been over 40 hours now and I'm as clueless as I was 40 hours ago.

Thank you everyone in advance for helping.

I have cloned my "C:\" Drive succesfully on a regular basis without a problem since like 2 years ago, but there is a problem that I have always found, and is that before cloning the drive I have ALWAYS to clean the destination drive before the cloning or it will abort in the midel of the process.

So I always use the Disk Partition tool from the windows cmd to clean the drive, then I have to initialize it in the device mannager and then run the cloning tool and it always works. If I do not do the cleaning it always fails. I hope that helps if that is your case. I also use Todo Backup. The free version.