Need help with a pciex 4.0 nvme, can't clone

Illuminist

Illuminist

Illuminist

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Hey there,

If someone with a deeper knowledge could help I would be over the moon.

Bought a pciex4.0 nvme and tried to clone it using acronis from my nvme boot drive, it kept saying that there was a problem when I tried to boot with it. It also then refused to boot from my original drive unless i removed the new. Then booted to windows, then restarted with the new drive in. I've never had this hassle before and I've done it for the last 20 years, I'm stumped.
@Vince I'm pretty sure you know about these things
But any help whatsoever would be fantastic.

I did read that making an image would be a better option and booting with windows pe and installing from the image would work but I need hand holding as the guides online are too vague.

Appreciate any help given
 
I've done this successfully using ATI but had the second drive in an external USB3 enclosure - the second M.2 socket was under the mobo so not accessible. I'd guess that something went wrong when cloning the boot sector, your PC then decided that the new drive was the one to boot from and failed. Booting the PC with just the original reset the boot order so all was well when you put the second one back in. I suggest trying again without wiping the new drive.
 
wazza300 said:
Did you try a start up repair with just the newly cloned drive attached,should fix the boot record

Tried with different cloning software,macrium reflect
Click to expand...
Tried with macrium, tried a repair it just tells me outright that it can't with no explaination.... Could it be something to do with 512k to 4096k cloning?, if I formated it to 512 I would lose performance though right?
 
I also fresh installed windows on this new drive as a test. It worked fine, but when the other drive is in as well, no setting known to god would let it boot it would just default to the old drive ebben if I disabled all the drives apart from the new one and forced boot to the new one, it would boot the old os

Never in 20 years have I had such a stupid problem
 
Read this

This drive is very fast and install was easy. This is down in the weeds a bit, but an important note is that it uses 4k byte sectors and has no 512 byte emulation (512e). This minor detail cost me 12+ hours of trying to figure out how to make the drive work with what I needed to do with it (clone and encrypt my OS). For clean installs, this should not be a problem. Cloning a hard drive is a problem, however, because you will need to have cloning software that can convert 512 byte sectors to 4k sectors, and even then, the cloning software may not be able to convert the boot partition (which happened to me), which will result in it being impossible to boot your computer. Most modern hard drives have 4k physical sectors (like this one) but emulate 512 byte sectors for compatibility purposes (some programs still are only compatible with 512 byte sectors). This drive does not emulate, which causes the above-mentioned issues. If doing a clean install of Windows, the drive should be fine and is very fast, but cloning did not work for me

From a user review

Is it a sabrent drive?
 
wazza300 said:
Read this

This drive is very fast and install was easy. This is down in the weeds a bit, but an important note is that it uses 4k byte sectors and has no 512 byte emulation (512e). This minor detail cost me 12+ hours of trying to figure out how to make the drive work with what I needed to do with it (clone and encrypt my OS). For clean installs, this should not be a problem. Cloning a hard drive is a problem, however, because you will need to have cloning software that can convert 512 byte sectors to 4k sectors, and even then, the cloning software may not be able to convert the boot partition (which happened to me), which will result in it being impossible to boot your computer. Most modern hard drives have 4k physical sectors (like this one) but emulate 512 byte sectors for compatibility purposes (some programs still are only compatible with 512 byte sectors). This drive does not emulate, which causes the above-mentioned issues. If doing a clean install of Windows, the drive should be fine and is very fast, but cloning did not work for me

From a user review

Is it a sabrent drive?
Click to expand...
Certainly is... Darn, I read that if I format the drive to 512 it will work but I'll lose speed which is counter intuitive for the speed it is
 
@Illuminist I am fairly sure that the latest version of Macrium at least the paid for version I have doesn't care for disk geometry be that sector or cluster sizes. So long as you don't destroy the layout of the disk too much and copy across the required partitions or make sure you fix your bootloader if you do kill the layout it should still work. At least with macruim it only takes a live VSS copy of the data, as in it is equal to taking a backup and restoring it to any given disk or array It's agnostic to the destinations geometry, or at least that is my understanding.

4k Sector size disks are not a new thing and have been around for several years, software knows how to deal with it so long as you aren't using really old software versions, I was trying to dig further as I know I have cloned between different sector and geometry disks but all I can find on Macriums site is this vague bit:

A storage block is the minimum allocation unit of a filesystem. For NTFS, it is called a cluster. It is made up of a contiguous block of sectors. A sector is the minimum addressable unit of data on a disk, and typically represents 512 or 4096 bytes.
Click to expand...

Or perhaps not... there is a table here that shows compatible clones disk geometry: https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7/Incompatible+Disk+Selected

The only software I have found that claims to be able to go from 512 to 4k is one called Casper:

https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/faq.aspx
 
Last edited:
Vince said:
@Illuminist I am fairly sure that the latest version of Macrium at least the paid for version I have doesn't care for disk geometry be that sector or cluster sizes. So long as you don't destroy the layout of the disk too much and copy across the required partitions or make sure you fix your bootloader if you do kill the layout it should still work. At least with macruim it only takes a live VSS copy of the data, as in it is equal to taking a backup and restoring it to any given disk or array It's agnostic to the destinations geometry, or at least that is my understanding.

4k Sector size disks are not a new thing and have been around for several years, software knows how to deal with it so long as you aren't using really old software versions, I was trying to dig further as I know I have cloned between different sector and geometry disks but all I can find on Macriums site is this vague bit:



Or perhaps not... there is a table here that shows compatible clones disk geometry: https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7/Incompatible+Disk+Selected

The only software I have found that claims to be able to go from 512 to 4k is one called Casper:

https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/faq.aspx
Click to expand...
You are a legend but everything worked but just didn't work. Thank you though v man
 
Illuminist said:
You are a legend but everything worked but just didn't work. Thank you though v man
Click to expand...

I probably wont work because of where the bootloader thinks the first sector is, that is my guess. At least you sorted it with a reinstall. :) Sometimes it's just easier that way I guess.
 
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