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I'm trying to migrate my current Windows 10 installation from a 256GB NVME disk to a 2TB one. I'm working through some of the documentation for this cloning utility provided by Western Digital and came across this critical recommendation:

Steps to Clone an Operating System Drive with Acronis True Image for Western Digital

This article explains how to clone an Operating System drive with Acronis True Image for Western Digital.

STOP Critical:

Acronis Rescue Media must be used when cloning an operating systems boot drive.

I'm curious what is it precisely about the boot drive that requires special treatment? Just how would the rescue media tooling do something beyond what the regular Acronis True Image Clone Disk feature is capable of doing when running as a process, TrueImage.exe, in Windows?

Acronis True Image for Western Digital Task Manager showing TRueImage.exe

Context

When I actually went to flash a USB drive with a Rescue Media Builder with a WinRE-based media, 64bit, I found that the utility booted up successfully but was not able to recognize the NVME drives on my system. I snooped online a bit and found this answer to this question https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2020-forum/acronis-boot-media-wont-recognize-internal-pcie-nvme-drive-ssd

I believe Acronis is missing a driver to be able to read this type of drives.

And judging from the windows background the rescue builder booted up in it appears like a Windows 7 type environment. Windows 7 is known to lack NVME drivers by default and requires special patches to get that functional.

Windows 7 doesn't support nvme natively. Specific hotfixes and nvme drivers have to be installed to add nvme support. Get hotfixes from microsoft support site.

  • KB2990941
  • KB3087873​

The two NVME M.2 drives on my PC are visible when I boot up from Windows normally, just not from the Acronis Rescue Media USB drive. The two drives being visible from my PC I naturally could just use the regular Clone Disk utility but since it has that critical warning placed in the documentation I am pausing for a bit in my cloning endeavors to learn more about this subject.

See the two NVME drives seen in the Clone Disk Wizard when ran from Windows. Clone Disk Wizard running from PC

Now notice the two drives being absent when ran from the rescue media USB Clone Disk Wizard running from Rescue Media

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    At a guess, Rescue Media boots and runs from USB or other external drive, and can do things that cannot be safely done for a mounted drive. That said, there are many other drive imaging utilities you might use.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Jul 9, 2023 at 4:35
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    It’s only required because your using Acronis to clone your drive. Use different disk cloning software that doesn’t rely on outdated version of WinRE.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jul 9, 2023 at 5:06
  • @DrMoishePippik: While technically that makes sense, I don't see why Acronis couldn't use VSC to safely perform a clone of a live partition (like disk2vhd does).
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 5:53

1 Answer 1

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So there was no restriction after all, just overcautious stale documentation it would seem.

I went through the wizard once more, set my source disk as the small disk (Disk 9 below) and selected the destination disk as the larger NVME disk (Disk 8 below) and proceeded. The clone operation eventually completed and marked as succeeded

The disk was successfully cloned.

I shut down the computer, removed the drive, installed back into the laptop, booted up and everything was as expected.

Destination disk selected

cloning disk progress

disk successfully cloned

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