W10: "Clone" a T420 boot drive for a T460p

[Dodge DeBoulet]

As I write this, I'm awaiting the arrival of my new T460p while currently using a T420. The T420 has been upgraded to Windows 10 Pro, and seems to be fast, reliable and stable (only 1 exception/crash/reboot since installation).

I'm wondering what will happen if I clone the 1TB primary SSD in my T420 to the 2TB SSD I'm going to install in the T460p. I have installed a fair amount of software that I'd rather not reinstall if I don't have to.

Are the architectures of the two laptops similar enough that this won't be a huge issue? I know the nVidia drivers will need to be installed, and I suspect the Lenovo Update App will likely get a workout.

If it's totally impractical, I won't even bother trying. But I am curious ...

[MrMaguire]

The best way to know if Windows will boot on the new hardware is to just try it, as in move the old hard drive to the new machine temporarily. I have tried moving Windows from one machine to another several times. The success in doing so seems completely random. The only pattern I've noticed is that it never works when I need it to, lol.

(FYI, moving Windows from a non-ThinkPad to a ThinkPad seems to result in a blinking cursor and no booting at all. I'm not sure why that is.)

If it doesn't work (you get a blue screen), you can run the Sysprep utility from C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep with the Generalise function enabled, while the drive is in the T420. The Generalise function will essentially remove all ties Windows has to the hardware on which it's running. Sysprep will essentially "renew" Windows, and prepare it to be run as if it were a new installation.

Keep in mind that Sysprep will:

- Not delete your user account, or its profile
- Not delete any of your programmes
- Require drivers to be reinstalled (but only when using the Generalise function)
- Will not remove Windows updates
- Require re-activation

Sysprep will do its thing and depending upon what option you chose, it might shut down / restart. When it does shut down, make sure it DOES NOT BOOT AGAIN ON THE OLD HARDWARE. If it does boot up again, Sysprep will need to be run again. The idea is for Sysprep to run, and then for the drive to be cloned to the new hardware, or for the existing drive to be moved.


Yeah, it's a convoluted process. But honestly, that's the best way to do it.

[Dodge DeBoulet]

Yeah, it's a convoluted process. But honestly, that's the best way to do it.

How about cloning the T420's 1TB drive to the new 2TB drive first, install the 2TB drive in the T420 (removing the 1TB for safekeeping), run sysprep, then swap the 2TB drive to the T460p?

That way my T420's original drive remains unchanged ...

[MrMaguire]

Yes, that will work just fine.

[Dodge DeBoulet]

Yes, that will work just fine.

Perfect! Thanks for the pointer on Sysprep. I've never used it, but it looks straightforward enough.

[Dodge DeBoulet]

Yes, that will work just fine.

I've never used it, but it looks straightforward enough.

Famous last words. *Sigh*.

With my T460p scheduled to arrive in less than 36 hours (as of last night), I set out to get my new 2TB Samsung 850Pro SSD prepped for installation.

Since I use Acronis True Image for backup and it's been both reliable and fast, I decided to use it to clone the T420's 1TB drive to the new 2TB drive. So the 2TB went into the Ultrabay and I started the cloning process. Roughly 10 minutes in, though, it halted with a disk read error that I could not safely bypass; it recommended I run chkdsk /r before trying again.

So ... running chkdsk for bad sector analysis requires a reboot to eliminate any other processes writing to the drive during its run. However, when I rebooted, I saw the "press any key to skip ..." message for 2-3 seconds only, and the computer would then boot normally. I went internet-fishing for reasons why this might happen and tried the suggested solutions, but nothing made any difference. The S.M.A.R.T data for both drives looked fine, so I wrote the read error off as an Acronis bug.

I downloaded Samsung's Data Migration utility, started it, and roughly an hour later it completed successfully. So yay, the 1TB drive is now cloned to the new drive!

I shut down the T420, replaced the 1TB drive with the 2TB drive, and got busy. I first attempted to download every driver update available for the T460p, but the "batch" option on the Lenovo site required the installation of the Lenovo Service Bridge application which failed repeatedly with an error: An error occurred trying to download 'https://download.lenovo.com/lsb/LSB.application'.

The error log referenced by the LSB installer was no more informative than the setup application itself, and running it as Administrator made no difference. So I downloaded all of the updates individually, which took another 20-30 minutes (note that my intent was to simply have them ready for installation on the cloned drive in the event I could not get connected to the internet once the drive was installed in the T460p).

So, with all updates and utilities downloaded and the T420's original 1TB drive set aside for safekeeping, I dove into SysPrep.

The first attempt failed almost immediately, complaining that SysPrep can't be used on an upgraded system (I did, in fact, do an in-place upgrade from Windows 7 Pro on the T420 in late August of last year). I discovered an article with instructions for modifying the registry to bypass that error, which worked.

Of course, SysPrep still didn't want to complete; it complained about a software package that was installed for only the current user and not all users (it appeared to be a printer driver, so I have no idea how that happened). Since the driver wasn't listed in the standard "Programs and Features" control panel app, I had to do some digging, and located some Powershell modules that identified the full program name and allowed me to uninstall it.

Sadly, that was only the first of a long string of apps that needed to be removed to get past that error, but I was finally rewarded with SysPrep's progress bar, which indicated that the Generalize operation had started and was in progress.

An hour later, it was still in progress.

Looking at the SysPrep log, it appeared to stop doing anything other than animate the progress bar once it logged the error "setupdigetclassdevs failed with error 0." Googling that (on my iPad, since SysPrep had gotten far enough to effectively disable my LAN/Internet access) didn't turn up anything conclusive, and by this time it was well past 1AM.

So I killed the SysPrep process, shut down the T420, and reinstalled its original 1TB drive. To my amazement (at this point I had lost all hope that anything I did would actually work), it booted up normally and I went to bed.

I'm not sure how to proceed at this point. I don't know whether SysPrep got far enough to allow the installation on the new drive to "do the right thing" once it's installed in the T460p. If it doesn't, I guess I'll simply clone the Windows 10 installation from the 500GB drive in the T460p onto the 2TB drive, then start the tedious process of re-installing Office Pro, VMWare Workstation, Kaspersky and the various utilities I've collected over the 3 years I've had T420.

Fortunately, the important software installations are all contained in the collection of Win2k, XP, Win7, Ubuntu, CentOS and RHEL 7 virtual machines that I'll be copying onto the new system, so getting my development environments back up and running should be fairly painless (more "famous last words"). And I'll be keeping the T420 around in its current form for a couple of months, just in case I missed something.

Apologies for the long post, and please don't take it the wrong way. I truly appreciate the pointer to SysPrep; it could've made the process quite easy. I guess my environment is a bit too far outside of the norm for SysPrep to accommodate, but it was great in theory!

[MrMaguire]

I'm really sorry that you've had such a _nightmare_ with this.

I use Sysprep quite frequently, and it usually works without issue. You know, sometimes I think that things only go wrong because we really want them to go right. That being said, the fact that you have an upgraded Windows install may be the root of the issue here. If it is, sincere apologies from me for not recognizing that as a potential issue... At least you have the intact install on the 1TB drive, so nothing is lost.

At this point, I would say that trying to accommodate Sysprep is a net loss. Even if it did prepare the system to run on the new hardware, the stability of Windows could be adversely affected.

You may be better off tediously reinstalling your programmes onto the new T460p install. It's a boring job, but spread it over a few days and before you know it'll be done. Then you won't have to do it again until you get a new laptop, or need to reinstall Windows for whatever reason.

Though, there is one last option. You could still try the T420's hard drive in the T460p "as is". If it boots up without having to use Sysprep, you're laughing, and after installing some drivers the job is basically done.

(The forum replaced "_nightmare_" in the first sentence with "Overused word". Thanks for that! )

[Dodge DeBoulet]

I'm really sorry that you've had such a _nightmare_ with this.

I use Sysprep quite frequently, and it usually works without issue. You know, sometimes I think that things only go wrong because we really want them to go right. That being said, the fact that you have an upgraded Windows install may be the root of the issue here. If it is, sincere apologies from me for not recognizing that as a potential issue... At least you have the intact install on the 1TB drive, so nothing is lost.

At this point, I would say that trying to accommodate Sysprep is a net loss. Even if it did prepare the system to run on the new hardware, the stability of Windows could be adversely affected.

You may be better off tediously reinstalling your programmes onto the new T460p install.

Though, there is one last option. You could still try the T420's hard drive in the T460p "as is". If it boots up without having to use Sysprep, you're laughing, and after installing some drivers the job is basically done.

(The forum replaced "_nightmare_" in the first sentence with "Overused word". Thanks for that! )

I think the "one last option" is worth the attempt; I'll re-clone the 1TB drive to the new 2TB drive, though, and use that instead of just trying to boot off the 1TB. I'd hate to get to the point where it started installing new drivers, encountered an issue, and left me in a situation where I might not be able to boot the T420.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[Dodge DeBoulet]

Well, cloning the 1TB drive to the 2TB drive produced something that booted just fine on the T420, but wasn't even recognized as bootable on the T460p. So I cloned the 500GB drive the T460p came with via a USB3-attached SATA dock. That worked fine, and the 2TB Sammy booted up normally after I installed it.

I'm now in the process of reinstalling all of my software, and have run into a snag with one of my VMs. It appears as though my 1TB drive has developed a bad cluster smack in the middle of one of my most critical VM images, and I can't copy it to the new system. Fortunately I have backups, and I'm working on getting it restored now.

The keyboard layout is taking a bit of getting used to, but I'm absolutely loving the WQHD display. Clear and bright, and I don't see any flicker at all. And I can absolutely feel the difference in performance over the T420. I'm quite anxious to see how things perform when I fire up a few VMs. With 32GB, they won't be memory starved, that's for sure