From: nospam@needed.invalid
On Mon, 1/5/2026 8:18 AM, Frank Slootweg wrote:
> Roger Mills wrote:
>> On 04/01/2026 21:47, Steve wrote:
>>> The holidays are over and I should have time to continue the project I
>>> was working on 2 weeks ago.
>>>
>>> I'm trying to switch to my new Samsung 870 EVO SATA 2.5 inch drive. The
>>> paper in the box said to use Samsung Magician to clone the data. I'm
>>> starting to believe that it doesn't work with a SATA drive!
>>>
>>> People suggested I use a different cloning tool. I dismissed that idea
>>> because, certainly, Samsung Magician would work after I got my computer
>>> to recognize the new drive. Well I did that. It's now showing on File
>>> Explorer as drive (J:) and I have formatted it. I tested it by copying a
>>> file with several pictures inside to (J:). It went right in and the
>>> pictures opened just fine. I formatted again to empty it.
>>>
>>> I looked at you tube videos about using Samsung Magician. They all
>>> showed a ssd that did not look like my SATA drive. Samsung Magician
>>> seems to have 2 ways to get to "Data Migration". One way pops up a
>>> message that the drive isn't compatible. I originally feared that it was
>>> warning me that the new drive wasn't compatible with my computer. Going
>>> in the other way, it shows my C: drive as the source drive but it
>>> prompts me to connect the Samsung SSD. It doesn't see it even though it
>>> IS there and it works.
>>>
>>> What cloning software is going to work with my SATA SSD?
>>
>> Have you installed the SATA SSD inside the computer alongside the
>> existing drive? If so, that could be the problem. I have a feeling that
>> Magician expects the SSD to be an external drive, mounted in a suitable
>> enclosure and connected by USB3. That's certainly what happened when I
>> replaced a rotating drive with an SSD in a laptop a few years ago. That
>> worked fine. That was the only option in my case because the laptop
>> couldn't accommodate more than one internal drive at a time.
>>
>> Maybe worth a try?
>
> I indeed think that an *internal* drive which is *formatted* - i.e.
> has a drive letter -, is a no-no for Samsung Magician.
>
> IIRC, initially the SSD was not visible in Disk Management, causing
> Samsung Magician not to see it. Now the SSD *is* visible in Disk
> Management, but because it has a drive letter and is formatted, Samsung
> Magician probably considers it as a no-go area and rightfully so.
>
> So Steve may want to remove the (J:) partition and see if Samsung
> Magician now recognizes the SSD.
>
> OTOH, as others have also suggested, it's better to use Macrium
> Reflect (Free) to do the cloning or imaging, because for Macrium you
> don't have to guess what is doing what (and there's a lot of Macrium
> experience/expertise in these groups).
>
I reproduced Steves symptoms here.
The problem has nothing to do with the particular target drive.
It was the *source drive choice* that broke it.
Even though the software only agrees to "copy the drive that has
the C: partition on it", there is a menu button on the upper left
where you *must* select the only drive possible, while in the Dashboard.
The program is too dumb to autoselect the drive with C: on it! From
a programming perspective, you likely have some idea how tortured
such a determination is on Windows, and a Junior Programmer wants
no part of such code.
Samsung has not heard of "Story Boarding" for programs, and it
took a single post on Reddit, to inform me of what I was
supposed to be doing as a user!
The dashboard rewards you with a summary with a lot of zeros in it.
It does not "parse" source foreign drives well, in the Dashboard. The
C: drive you're copying from, might be a WD hard drive or a
Team Group SSD, and in both cases the parsing in Dashboard will be lame.
Then, in the Data Migration (now that we've selected the only
drive that can function as a source), we are offered an opportunity
to select one of our N Samsung drives as the target for cloning.
The application warns you that the content will be erased.
The source partition menu in Data Migration, only allows the selection of three
partition with "letters". It could be C: D: E: for example,
off the source drive to the dest drive. Presumably this behavior
is an avoidance-of-complexity issue with handling an MSDOS partitioned
source drive :-) They don't want to convert Primary partitions
to Extended/Logical ones and create a no boot problem on a multi-boot
disk.
Now, maybe it copies your 100MB ESP partition, your 16MB Microsoft Reserved,
the 1GB Recovery partition, but there is no evidence on the screen at all,
of what it is really doing down there. You'd have to click the button,
"wait 24 minutes", then go in with diskpart and fish around for the details.
A scary thought, is it is using Robocopy to copy C: :-) File-by-file is
a less efficient way to copy for SSDs, and cluster-by-cluster has occasional
efficiencies where one NAND page gets updated with four clusters in one go.
This program is "junior programmer material". There is no visible evidence,
no evidence at all, that it will make a guaranteed-bootable drive for you.
Does it make a VSS shadow copy of C: (as it should) ? Does it copy Windows.edb
or pagefile.sys ? What other things don't they know, or don't want to
write code for ?
Paul
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
