ssd trouble

wex96

I've got a 128gb ssd, was hoping to clone it. I have it in a sata docking station but my laptop doesn't pick it up. It picks up the docking station and says it's there then after a minute and all dissappear. Can't format it to assign a drive letter.
any help is greatly appreciated

the_syco

What's the solid state make/model and most importantly its age, and why are you trying to clone it in the first place?

I'm guessing it's having problems, so you want to get the data off it?

wex96

It's brand new out of box, want to make it my main hard drive
SanDisk 128gb ssd

ED E

D'oh.

You dont want to clone it, you want to clone TO it (or image onto it).

It comes unformatted like any other HDD, you'd have to format to mount it in windows. But thats pointless if you actually want to clone to it as the cloning utility will need to format it again. Your cloning utility should be able to handle a raw disk.

EDIT: Misread, you cant format it? Is this a proper dock with a separate PSU?

wex96

No its an eBay special. My other standard sata drives work on it. It's usb run
I'm using easus, it doesn't pick it up.

Moon54

Drive probably just needs to be initalised & formatted, it's a brand new SSD, yes?
I'd say you're caddy just can't handle un-initialisd disks at low level because it going from SATA->USB.

You could try putting SSD in a desktop PC with an actual SATA cable attached. Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Un-initialised drive will appear as black box. Right-click Initialise, right-click format.

If you don't have a desktop you could remove the laptop hard drive, insert SSD, run a windows set-up disk, windows can initialise
& format it before the full install starts. Remove SSD and you should then be able to use it in the caddy.

However, a fresh windows install is always preferable when moving to an SSD as windows will properly set up the SSD for you,
disabling Defrag, enabling TRIM etc.