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I have bought the Samsung 840 EVO SSD of 250 GB. I have put the SSD in my laptop in stead of my DVD player using a HHD Caddy. Now the samsung SSD comes with a data migration tool. Have numerous times tried to install that software but it just halts during installtion on a brand new windows 8.1 installation.

So then I read about Clonezilla. I tried to use it and booted my machine from an usb stick. I have followed the wizard various times but every time on the moment supreme i get the error: Failed to find this partition in this system: sda1 and that for all Sda's.

I am sure that the data on my HHD fits on my SSD so that's for sure not the problem. Does anyone have suggestions on how to solve this? It's for sure possible to clone a HDD to SSD.

Thanks very much.

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  • First of all, ignore that disc with Norton Ghost. Don't even install it. If you use it to clone a disc, it might try to rewrite the source disk's boot information to create a dual-boot configuration (yuck!), which might even screw up your original installation (which it did in my case).
    – Mario
    Commented Jul 4, 2014 at 7:48
  • Do you have access to a desktop system to clone the drive there? Also is it possible that there's some hard disk encryption going on?
    – Mario
    Commented Jul 4, 2014 at 7:49
  • I can't get the HHD out of my laptop
    – sanders
    Commented Jul 4, 2014 at 7:50

2 Answers 2

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Right now I'd recommend you to try GParted. It's a live CD similar to Clonezilla, but it provides you with a nice graphical interface rather than text based console menus.

If possible, create a backup of your HDD first, since you'll have to modify the original partition.

Essentially the steps involved should look like this:

  • Shrink your HDD's partition to properly fit the SSD.
  • Apply the change.
  • Copy everything off the HDD onto the SSD.
  • Apply the changes.

You don't have to defragment your disk first (but it might speed up things) and you don't have to downscale the partition further than necessary. The tools included in GParted (namely ntfsclone) will actively read the NTFS partition and only copy data necessary (i.e. it won't create a 1:1 copy and rather only copy space that's in use).

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Many things can behind the error you get.

  • Partition is physically larger vs. target partition (in your case the HDD partition to clone needs to be below 250 GB, including free space)
  • After boot, the cloning software cannot see the partitions (check BIOS settings).
  • Cloning software has no drivers for your drives.

Best way to clone is to avoid that the HDD to clone is a system drive. So I would somehow remove it, and clone on an external machine.

If you want cloning, you need to match the size of the source and target partition.

  1. Check: partition to clone is same size or smaller as target space.
  2. Resize source partition to fit target space. You can only shrink free space. Delete data, empty the TEMP folder, uninstall unnecessary software, run CC cleaner, etc. to free up space. The cloning software might be able to resize the source partition automatically, or on the fly.

  3. Execute cloning. The software runs independently from the OSon the HDD: LiveCD, USB drive, or restarts-boots into its mini operating system. You have to make sure the cloning software has drivers for your laptop's drives, and can see them physically after booting. If your laptop has a UEFI Bios, make sure your cloning program can handle UEFI.

  4. Make sure target partition is ready to be bootable (active partition, your OS is the first to boot, etc.). The cloning software might do this automatically or not.

Some programs to do this on Windows: LINK

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