Dell Inspiron Cloning Problems

1. I gave support at the Acronis site for years. Often we saw that clones had issues booting. We recommended that users perform a sort of reverse clone, whereby the source disk is removed from the computer and the new target disk is installed. Then, boot from the recovery environment, usually on flash drive, to clone from the source disk in an external interface to the new internal target disk.

2. I and many other experts at the Acronis site recommend against cloning. Cloning is an "all or nothing" process. If something goes wrong, the user may end up with two unbootable drives and loss of data. Backup and recovery is a far safer method, and allows for multiple tries if the user is unfamiliar. Cloning has no advantage over full backup and restore, except a slight time saving at the expense of considerably more risk and complexity.

Along with safety, another advantage over cloning is that you can store multiple full disk images on a single external drive. To migrate to a new drive, remove the old drive from the computer, install the new drive, boot from the recovery media and perform a full disk restore of the disk image to the new drive. I have performed this process dozens of times to save systems with failing drives or simply to "roll back" the system after a new application install caused undesirable effects.

Do not have both drives in the computer when you boot from the new drive for the first time. That can result in both drives being unbootable. 

When you clone a drive, you must immediately shut down afterward. Mount the new drive and remove the old one.

Then boot the system.

If you attempt to boot the system with both the original and the image drive together, the new drive will never appear as bootable.

Yes. You may backup to any media: SSD; external hard drive; even a flash drive if it were large enough to contain the image.

Note that you must perform a full disk image backup. When selecting what to backup, you must select the entire drive, not just individual partitions. In the Acronis media there are checkboxes for partitions (and for MBR on older MBR disks), but a higher-ranked checkbox for the entire drive.

P.S. What model is your laptop? You said Inspiron 3910, but that is a desktop system.

Thanks filbert.  I am going to try this method today.  I'll let you know the results.

BTW, I have two separate SSDs.  I assume I can store the image on one of them and then install the clean SSD in the machine and do the restore from it.....correct?

The other wildcard here is the drive that has developed bad sectors.  It is possible there is corruption on the source drive that's preventing a good clone or image from being made.

Where on the disc were the bad sectors?  If there are bad or marginal sectors in critical locations on the drive, the cloning process may never succeed successfully.

Thanks for the response but I did exactly as you recommend without success.

I agree with ejn63. I had a drive that I couldn't successfully clone due to bad sectors. While I was able to use Windows Backup to make a backup of the failing drive, when I tried to restore it on the new drive, it ended up failing when it got to the end (possibly because of the bad sectors). I ended up mounting the Windows backup as a virtual drive and using Macrium Reflect to clone it over to the new drive. After a bit of boot loader configuration, only then was I able to get everything copied over and working correctly on the new drive.

At this point, you may want to consider just backing up your personal files and application data to an external drive before the original hard drive becomes more problematic. After doing so, shut down completely and remove the original drive from the system. Install your SSD drive, then install Windows (from a recovery drive or Windows installation media) and copy your files back over once it completes. Yes, you will have to reinstall your programs and setup your PC again, but it's better than losing all of your personal files.

Just for info, do you have anything you can boot to and get into a Command Prompt window with the SSD installed?

I don't normally clone drives but I do know there are options which can be important as to how the cloned drive is configured.

The new drive is a 2.5 inch SSD?

You don't need to pre-format the drive.  

I originally used that software to clone the drive....without success.  My latest attempt was to use EaseUS ToDo Backup to create a complete backup of the HDD.  I restored t the new SSD....again, without success.  The new SSD will not boot.

Inspiron 15-3567

Still struggling.

I used EaseUS ToDo Backup to perform a complete backup.  It appeared to complete successfully.  Then I did a restore to my new SSD.  Again, this process appeared to complete successfully.  Then, during the boot process, I hit F2 to go into the setup to ensure the SSD was first in the boot sequence, but it does not appear. Using Disk Manager on another computer, here is the comparison between the old HDD (Disk 5) and the new SSD (Disk 4).  I've gone through this (long) process twice with no success.  Again, I'm sure I'm doing something wrong but I don't know what it could be.

Is this what you were using?  On the bottom of the page it has instructions how to clone a drive.

Best Disk Copy/Clone Software for Easy Data Migration - EaseUS Disk Copy

Update:  I eventually found a bug in the EaseUS software that caused my imaging process to fail.  I ended up just downloading an updated version of Windows and started from scratch, reloading all my applications and data from a successful backup I took back in December.

I appreciate all the suggestions and solutions.  In a "normal" situation I'm sure they would have worked.