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    HOW TO: Help me Clone original ASUS SSD to larger SSD.

    Discussion in 'Asus' started by olain, Jul 23, 2014.

  1. olain

    olain Newbie

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    Dear ASUS owners. I would like to make a guide on how to migrate from a small SSD to a large SSD, keeping everything including the F9-boot-to-recovery-partition intact.
    Please help me make a good tutorial, because I still haven't found out how!

    I purchased my ASUS Zenbook UX32LN with a small SSD, because I had a bigger and better one waiting to be installed in the Zenbook.

    First try of migrating would be a 1-to-1 clone of the SSD through traditional 3rd party cloning software:
    • I cloned the smaller SSD harddrive to the bigger SSD via my PC using HDClone5 (which is free). Of course this meant that the new SSD had some extra space, which was the plan so that is good.
    • I installed the larger SSD in the zenbook and it booted up all nice and good, and I could reboot and do shutdown/startups.
    • However if I pressed F9 at boot to see that the recovery partition worked, I would get the horrid "Your PC needs to be repaired” and “Error code: 0xc0000225”.
    • From this point I would not be able to reboot and get in to windows, so this method was fail.

    I then erased and cleaned my large SSD with diskpart.exe.

    So I tried another method, trying to get the stock "image" of the ASUS SSD transferred to the new SSD via Windows Recovery:
    • I installed the original SSD in the zenbook and booted it into Windows.
    • From there I ran the "Create a recovery drive" guide and chose to copy my recovery partition to a USB-pen.
    • I replaced the small SSD with the large one.
    • I booted from the USB-pen and chose to recover windows completely using the "resize partition" option.
    • Upon completion I could bootup Windows and everything was good, I could do reboots and shutdown/startups.
    • But if I pressed F9 on boot, it would not boot into recovery mode, so this function was now broke, even though a recovery partition had been created on the large SSD.

    Method 1 then, is not good, because you will "brick" your ASUS if you accidentally press F9 on boot. And also you dont have a working recovery partition.
    Method 2 is not good either, because your recovery partition will not activate on F9, and this method will not let you keep your data, like Method 1 theoretically will let you.

    The only working option I have found is to use Method 2, and then delete the useless recovery partition through 3rd party partition software. And to keep the USB-pen forever-ever locked up somewhere hoping it will not fail once needed.

    What about you guys, have you been in my shoes, and what did you do?

    PS: I have contacted the local Danish ASUS support, and they just replied "We don't support hardware changes" :-(