Restore System To New HDD

jdennett

I have an Acer Aspire E1-571 SN: [edited for privacy] in U.K. with Windows 8 64 bit preinstalled and I am trying to upgrade the HDD to a SSD hybrid 1TB Seagate. The new drive is GPT formatted, online and healthy.

 

I have written a system image to the new drive and used the recovery disk to restore it to the new drive but the new drive is locked.

I tried making a byte for byte copy of the system disk to the new disk and restoring / recovering the system on the new drive, that didn't work, still locked.

I tried fitting my new drive with the byte for byte copy of the system and pointing the BIOS a the EFI files on the new drive, that didn't work, still locked.

Every time I put the original disk back it boots fine first time.

 

I'm sure I am no the first to find this, is there  sollution?

padgett

Is the new drive formatted FAT32 ? Shouldn't think it matters but know a recovery disk must be.

jdennett

No it is NTFS, I tried restoring the system image back to the drive it came from which is formatted NTFS and that worked fine.

Looking around the forums I think it is a security measure in UEFI secure boot as the new drive is there and healthy it is just not a boot drive and cannot be made one unless it is unlocked which I thought was a case of adding the EFI file to the database in the BIOS. I have seen YouTube videos where people do the restore with no problem from a system image using the recovery disk but there is no mention of 'locked drives' it is something which seems to be diferent on Acer laptops with preinstalled Windows8 64.

jdennett

I looked at alternative file systems, exFAT is the only other option, if I format the new drive exFAT it is incompatible with the system image backup, the error says drive must be NTFS.

taminrob

I just did this on an R7 and had a hell of a time getting it to work properly...I tried imaging, copying, transferring and cloning all with no success and at one point received the same "drive locked" message that you did.

 

What finally worked for me, and my definition of working is that I had full access to the stock recovery and everything worked exactly as it did out of the box, was using the Acer recovery program to copy the recovery partition to a USB drive, swap to the new SSD and boot from the usb drive to do a system restore telling it to re-write the partitions which will reinstall the factory recovery image on your new SSD.

 

A couple things though...

 

1- I could not get my machine to properly boot from my USB 3.0 port even though I was using a USB 3 thumb drive...moved it to the USB 2.0 port and it worked like it was supposed to (maybe that was just something on my laptop, but just thought I would throw it out there).

 

2- I had to completely erase my SSD before the process would work without errors and I mean erase everything...I had tried formatting the drive, ERROR...I tried delete any contents using command prompt, ERROR...and even letting recovery erase the files (never do that unless you don’t need a machine for a few days...**bleep** that takes forever!)...what ended up working was to erase ALL the partitions (there are several free programs out to do this...I used EaseUS partition master) on the drive and install it like that...the recovery usb will take care of format and with what partitions go where...I really think that’s where my problems were coming from is that recovery was unable to put things where it wanted because they were already taken.

 

Maybe this had nothing to do with the problem that you were having, but hopefully it helped...I wasted a whole weekend on a 1 hour project because I was unable to find the correct advice...on the good side, laptop is blazing fast now and I have peace of mind knowing that I have a working recovery.

 

By the way, make sure you test your recovery out...I thought I had it done several times only to have the process fail at around 78%...just my two cents.

 

jdennett

Thank you for that I will work through those suggestions.

 

Someone on a Microsoft Forum suggested I check for Bitlocker. I have necer used Bitlocker myself, would Acer have enabled or tested it when they installed the OS?

taminrob

To tell you the truth, I'm not sure...hopefully someone with more knowledge of that will chime in, but with that being said, if you are looking at deleting all the partitions on your SSD, it SHOULD erase whatever is making your drive show as locked.

 

Like I said, I just threw out what worked for me finally.  I am by no means an expert, I find I know just enough to keep myself out of trouble...most of the time...

padgett

BTW you could try running diskpart.exe but be aware that it is *very* ppwerful and dangerous to use on the disk you booted from. CLEAN will clear everything so make sure you SELECT the proper dive/partition.

pzi123

I am on the same page with you guys on R7 trying to use 'acer recovery management' and USB 'recovery drive' created with it.  I found interesting or hopeful the mention above about a difference in behavior when USB2 port is used instead of USB3.  I am rerunning the build of 'recovery drive' with 'create factory default backup' and later the restore of the image into a new non-partitioned drive.

My experience is that failing image restore fails completely on partitioning of the new drive. After the restore fails I go into advanced mode and use command line with diskpart.exe and look at what was done with the drive:

disk list

select disk 0

list part

 

and see that there is no partitions created on the new drive even after the system was running for a good part of the hour with progress report sometimes going as hight as 70% but most ofter fails at some 40%. You would expect that the partitions would be created and volumes formated.

 

Now back to repeting all with right port and USB2 instead of left ports and USB3....

pzi123

Switching the whole operation to USB2 did not help. The same result of 'resetting your pc' - new drive not touched after some 71% completion.

I think I will try changing the label type of the new drive - so far I used GPT label with no partitions on it now I will try MSDOS label (I use linux parted to operate on the disk before I put it into the aspire r7).

taminrob

Not sure if it will make a difference, but I couldnt get anything to work until I took everything off the new drive...I cant say for other programs because I havent used them, but in partition master (free version), I deleted all the partitions and the drive label...started off with a completely blank slate and then it took...I also tested it out by installing the OS then doing a restore on top of that and everything worked that time too.  Im not sure why ACER made it so difficult, but its as if the only way to get the reocvery partition on a new drive is to use a new drive right out of the box.

 

I know it CAN be an easy process...I bought 2 laptops at the same time and did the same upgrades (SSD, RAM and new wireless card) on the same day...the Samsung machine took it no problem (including an option to migrate to SSD including recovery partition, right there in their recovery software) but the ACER machine has fought me the whole way.

jdennett

Thanks for all the input, I am still working on this, I will post details when I resolve it.

pzi123

Since my last post on trying to get windoze 8 recovery drive and system image to work to restore the system to a new drive I looked at technet and other sources and see endless amount of threads from Microsoft SEs complaining about this not working at all. I think the intentions were good at Microsoft to duplicate what Linux folks use for decades until somebody realized that this technology of replacing the hard drive and restoring your backup would enable anybody to clone windoze at will.  They put the stop to it and made sure that you can restore the system only to the original drive.

This is not a big help if you want to have ablity to recover from the drive failure.

I decided that windoze 8 are not good for me and replaced with with Ubuntu 13 and VMware workstation 10 runing older windoze 7.  I installed Ubuntu into the SSD and boots very quickly and the hard drive is used for storage.

I saved the original drive in case I need to service the machine and replaced it with 750g Hitachi hybrid - the same I use in my MacBook pro.

jdennett

I did get the system on the new drive eventually. I bought a 64GB usb stick and used it with the Acer restore / recover application. I was able to backup and restore the recovery partition and the application settings to the new drive but it was just a basic default system restore, I had to re-install all my applications. I upgraded to Windows 8.1 and noticed the Windows 7 image backup has been removed.