Upgrading Acer Veriton X480G HDD to Samsung 860 EVO SSD

Iggy

Hi All

This isn't a question but documentation to the pitfalls of upgrading the hard drive of an Acer Veriton X480G to an SSD, in this case a Samsung 860 EVO 500GB. The computer is running a 32bit version of Windows 10.

The process is significantly more difficult than what some of the youtube clips would imply. I will first document the process then after will go into the long saga to find a solution. Warning this solution is not for beginners. There might be an easier solution that exists but I don't know what that would be. 

1) On the computer, I cleaned out the files in the recycling bin to try and speed up the cloning process. It is highly recommended you also get a 2.5 to 3.5 inch adaptor with screws. I ended up with a middle of the road adaptor which allows for twin 2.5 inch. It was overkill but that is all the shop had in stock and I didn't feel like waiting a few days for a cheaper one which fits one drive.

https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=221

Now specifically for Samsung SSD, do not use the Samsung Data Migration Software for cloning. It's not capable to clone the hidden recovery partition that shipped with your system. If your hard disk no longer has this then you will be able to use the Samsung Data Migration Software for easy cloning. For other brands of SSD and their cloning software, if the software can't see and clone the hidden recovery partition like the way Windows Disk Management can then you probably need other software to do this like Clonezilla. There maybe other windows 3rd party software that can do it, I don't know.

2) Create yourself either a bootable USB or cd of the clonezilla software. Specifically Clonezilla CD/USB live version. This program is able to make a block by block clone of the factory Acer setup including the hidden recovery partition.
https://clonezilla.org/

3) Shut down computer, touch metal case to ground yourself, unplug power cord then push front power button to drain all electricity from system. 

4) Open the computer case to connect SSD for cloning.Unplug Sata connections from CD-ROM. This will be temporarily borrowed to connect the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD.

Specifically for the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD, it needs a dedicated Sata power connection. It doesn't like sharing power with other devices.




5) Plug power cord back in and restart computer, press F12 to enter boot menu and boot from Clonezilla USB. Basically loads up Linux before Clonezilla starts up. Follow instructions to do disk to disk cloning
https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php

Clonezilla took about 15 mins to clone the hard disk which only had under 80gb of data on it. Was good to see the data transfer rate of 6gb a min as advertised by Samsung



6) Once cloning finishes, reboot and change boot order so computer boots up from SSD. When Windows first loaded I started up outlook and chrome as a little test. When I closed those programs Windows was partially unresponsive. Couldn't get menus up. I could do alt+ctrl+del to press the shutdown option and it didn't do anything so had to power off from the power button. Restarting Windows again seemed to fix things.

7) If the SSD is larger than the HDD then use Easeus Partition Master to resize partitions.

https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager/epm-free.html

Acer come out of the factory with 3 partitions, the recovery partition, C drive and D drive. To resize C drive I needed the paid version but if I didn't want to spend the money I could have expanded D drive or create a new E drive partition for free. I realised after I paid for partition manager I could resize D drive then shrink before expanding C drive for free.



8) With the partitions sorted shutdown the computer like in step 3 and swap out the HDD with the SSD. Disconnect the SSD and reconnect the CD Rom. Disconnect sata cables from the hard drive and pull out whole unit. Remove hard drive from the green plastic caddy. Be very careful removing. Videos on youtube suggested this was flexible but ours wasn't and broke. I reused the broken caddy but could have bought a used replacement cheaply.



9) Screw in SSD to 2.5 to 3.5 inch adaptor. Then place adaptor into the green plastic caddy. This helps the ssd be grounded as well to the metal case as the green caddy as a metal bit that touches the metal adaptor to the metal case. I'm only assuming the SSD needs to be grounded as the hard drive was grounded via the caddy metal touchpoint. If you are not getting an adaptor then you have to make sure the SSD is touching metal as you secure it inside the case.

10) Insert SSD with adaptor and caddy into the old hard drive slot. Connect sata cables to ssd. Plug in computer and test before closing the computer case again.

11) In this particular instance Samsung Magician SSD management utility notified me there was a firmware update for the SSD so I did the update.






So the long story. Having watched videos and research I thought upgrading the SSD was going to be easy. First issue was I plugged the SSD using a power splitter cable. Windows didn't see the drive. I think unplugged the splitter cable, normally used to power both CD Rom and USB 3.0 PCIe card, and plugged the dedicated power connector from the power supply into the SSD and then Windows could see it.

I next download and used Samsung data migration software to do the cloning. The software did mention if the hard drive has a vendor recovery partition it would not be able to clone it. I didn't think this was going to be an issue. After cloning I was overly confidence and physically swapped out the hard drive for SSD as I had seen countless times on youtube. That was a big mistake not to test booting from the SSD before fixing it into the adaptor then the caddy.

Booting from the SSD the windows start screen came up then the screen went black but I had what looked like a windows mouse pointer. Later I would deduce the SSD does at least partially boot into some strange mode with a message suggestion optimal screen resolution.



At this stage I reinstalled the hard drive to try and redo the cloning but then I discovered Windows couldn't see the drive. I thought the drive was dead and called the store 30mins before close on a Saturday and they said to drop the drive off on Monday for assessment before issuing a replacement. After the phone call I did decide to check the bios and to my surprise it could see the SSD.


It was getting late so I drove home from the office but it did occur to me afterwards that perhaps the SSD hardware wasn't dead at all but there was some kind of conflict or issue with the cloning process. Luckily I remembered that someone I went to college with to do a networking course was a gamer who built his own systems so I reached out to him and told him the scenerio. He basically recommended I use Clonezilla for the cloning and Easeus partition master afterwards to adjust the partition sizes. That night I created the bootable Clonezilla USB.

Next day I went back into the office. I installed the ssd back with the sata cables from the cd rom. Went into the bios to change the boot order to have it boot the usb first. But for some strange reason the computer still booted from the hard drive. Luckily at POST startup there is a second option to manually select the boot by pressing F12. I select the usb then Linux booted up and a minute or so later clonezilla started. Selected disk to disk cloning and made triple sure of the source and target drives then the cloning began and I was getting a good feeling already as I could see it cloned the hidden recovery partition.

When cloning was finished I changed the boot order to have the SSD first. It booted into windows and I tested using chrome and outlook but after closing these programs Windows was semi locked. Menu did respond. I pressed ctrl+alt+delete to get to a recovery screen and pressed the off button to power down but didn't respond so had to push the real power button to switch off.

Started up computer again and all test well. I connected an external SSD into the USB 3.0 port at the back and I was getting 150 Mb/s from external to internal SSD. The other way around I was getting 100 Mb/s. On the original USB 2.0 ports I was getting 28 MB/s

This SSD upgrade will most likely be the last upgrade to this particular PC. The only thing more to do that isn't going to cost the earth is upgrade from Windows 10 32bit to 64bit to take advantage of all 4 gb of RAM. But given it's age this is the end of the upgrades.