What to do after cloning old HDD to SSD

[Ewan France]

Hi there,
I recently bought a laptop/notebook,an asus e402ma.it comes with a 32 gb eMMC drive which is definitely not enough space. There's a 2.5" drive bay empty at the back so I've bought an SSD to go in it. So my plan is to clone the drive to the SSD and use that as my boot device instead.
I've looked up advice about this, and the advice seems to be to remove the old hard drive for a few days until your happy the clone was successful, however the drive is nob removable, so I'm not sure what the best action would be. Would you recommend I create recovery media and delete everything off the eMMC drive, or that I just set the SSD as the boot drive and leave the eMMC alone?
I'm not even sure if that last option will work though? so I'm hoping someone has some advice on this situation. Thanks in advance.

 

[ak47jar3d]

I would format the old drive once the new drive is fully cloned.

 

[Ewan France]

So do you think that that would work no problem?

 

[ak47jar3d]

Yes. It should work with no problem. Set the boot drive to the external one in bios. Boot the computer and format internal one.

 

[thurstonx]

I'm in the same boat with a new ASUS E402SA. I just ordered an SSD. I assume once it's installed and formatted, the system eMMC "drive" can be cloned to the SSD. My only question was about setting the SSD to the boot device in the BIOS.

What did you do in the end: leave the eMMC alone, or nuke it? I was thinking leaving it alone would be a nice backup of the OS, etc. I'm also wondering about drive letter conflicts.

Thanks.

 

[Ewan France]

I'm in the same boat with a new ASUS E402SA. I just ordered an SSD. I assume once it's installed and formatted, the system eMMC "drive" can be cloned to the SSD. My only question was about setting the SSD to the boot device in the BIOS.

What did you do in the end: leave the eMMC alone, or nuke it? I was thinking leaving it alone would be a nice backup of the OS, etc. I'm also wondering about drive letter conflicts.

Thanks.

Okay be super super careful what you do next. I cloned the drive perfectly, but as soon as I went to delete the old OS of the eMMC drive everything went to shit, couldnt fix it and had to return it, got a replacement, tried everything again being even more careful than before, and ruined it again. Im no expert but I definitely missed something. Unless you know something I don't, I would not suggest attempting to delete any essential files of the eMMC. If I were you, keep it simple, leave the OS on the eMMC and use the SSD for everything else.

 

[thurstonx]

I'm in the same boat with a new ASUS E402SA. I just ordered an SSD. I assume once it's installed and formatted, the system eMMC "drive" can be cloned to the SSD. My only question was about setting the SSD to the boot device in the BIOS.

What did you do in the end: leave the eMMC alone, or nuke it? I was thinking leaving it alone would be a nice backup of the OS, etc. I'm also wondering about drive letter conflicts.

Thanks.

Okay be super super careful what you do next. I cloned the drive perfectly, but as soon as I went to delete the old OS of the eMMC drive everything went to shit, couldnt fix it and had to return it, got a replacement, tried everything again being even more careful than before, and ruined it again. Im no expert but I definitely missed something. Unless you know something I don't, I would not suggest attempting to delete any essential files of the eMMC. If I were you, keep it simple, leave the OS on the eMMC and use the SSD for everything else.

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Thanks for the quick reply.

I ordered an inexpensive Crucial SSD today, so we'll see how it goes. Like I said, I'm planning on not deleting anything from the eMMC "drive," but still force the UEFI "BIOS" to boot from the SSD once I've cloned everything. I've done a lot of reading about Secure Boot and CMS in the UEFI, so I'm hopeful I can set the SSD to the boot device. I sent ASUS support an email, but I'm not holding my breath for a meaningful reply.

If I'm successful, I'll post a followup.

 

[thurstonx]

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Thanks for the quick reply.

I ordered an inexpensive Crucial SSD today, so we'll see how it goes. Like I said, I'm planning on not deleting anything from the eMMC "drive," but still force the UEFI "BIOS" to boot from the SSD once I've cloned everything. I've done a lot of reading about Secure Boot and CMS in the UEFI, so I'm hopeful I can set the SSD to the boot device. I sent ASUS support an email, but I'm not holding my breath for a meaningful reply.

If I'm successful, I'll post a followup.

I'll reply to myself. Long story short, got the SSD, cloned the eMMC several times using Partition Wizard and Macrium Reflect v6 (both free versions) - Acronis 2015 from Crucial promo couldn't even read the eMMC at the beginning of the clone process; LOL - tried to adjust partitions and just duplicating source drive, leaving huge amount of unallocated space on the SSD. I've messed around with diskpart and bcdedit, disabled Secure Boot, Fast Boot, even tried CSM mode in the UEFI firmware... can't get the SSD to boot. Tried EasyBCD, too, but it's hobbled by the UEFI firmware.

bcdedit seems to indicate the eMMC is the device the Boot Manager and Boot Loader are pointing to, and I lack the knowledge to edit the BCD (doing TONS of reading). At least Macrium's rescue environment has a Fix Boot Problems option that gets me back to booting from the eMMC when my mad scientist attempts fail. I was able to get diskpart to change the drive letters on the two "Windows" volumes, and both rescue environments (Partition Wizard and Macrium) show the SSD having the C: drive, the eMMC D:. But as I can only boot from the eMMC, once I'm in Windows 10, Disk Management shows the opposite, which makes sense.

Any ideas re: how to edit the BCD?

 

[clubset]

Did you ever find a way to resolve this? I am. In the same boat.

 

[astagor]

I have the same problem. Clone was successful, but as the eMMC card is build-in, I cannot disable it and Windows boots from it. I have added manual the the new system to the bootloader, but it does not boot. The boot from eMMC works fine.