My Blog

Fri Feb 28, 2025

I've been spending too much time watching YouTube and paying attention to Reddit.

On the bright side, I learned I really shouldn't be promoting Mozilla and removed the link on my Home Page. I added a link to LibreWolf in it's place.

While I was working on my site, I removed a few links on my navigation pane for Google Groups because it has been useless for years and filesearching.com because the page is now in Russian, which I neither speak nor read.

So, while most news is bad, it at least gave me some incentive to play with my site.

Mon Jun 09, 2025

I'm not a big gamer, mostly Minions of Mirth, Guild Wars 2, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. My gaming machine is a Dell G5 5090 I5-9400 2.90GHz. Apparently it's more than a bit dated, but it is adequate for my needs.

Now that I'm using my Laptop more, I seldom log into the desktop and it was pegging the disk to 100% when I woke it up to play. Windows 11 wouldn't let me do anything for several minutes. It would still be heavily thrashing the disk for 5 or 10 minutes. It was beginning to get old and I decided to do something about it.

I did a bit of research and figured I'd splurge and update from a WD 1TB SATA drive to a 1T Kingston NVMe. I ordered the NVMe and assumed cloning the system would be a piece of cake. I got the NVMe in the mail the next day day and the fun started.

I downloaded the recommended Debian version of Clonezilla, put it on a 32G USB stick and rebooted to confirm I could boot Clonezilla. All's good.

I opened up the Dell. It was much cleaner than expected. It took me a minute to find the mounting point for the NVMe. I inserted the stick and then had to find a screw to hold it in place. It's 3:30 AM. I got lucky and found one in my parts stash. It was a bit difficult to get started but again, all's good.

I rebooted the machine into Clonezilla and select English, US keyboard, Device to Device and get told I can't do anything because no second disk is found.

Reboot. Check UEFI/BIOS settings and the device is recognized. Turned off Secure Boot and tried Clonezilla again. No joy. Reboot.

Hit the wrong key and it started windows. Windows recognized the MVMe and asked me to initialize the device. I did so, and it is recognized as healthy. So the problem is Clonezilla.

I downloaded the testing version of Clonezilla on my Linux laptop. Plugged in the 32G USB stick and the Linux Laptop doesn't recognize the drive. Put my windows machine back on the network and downloaded testing again. Windows recognized the USB stick and I updated Clonezilla. Reboot.

Surprise, still not working. I dropped down to console and there was no device for the NVMe disk. Reboot.

Acronis True Image was recommended. While paid, it has a 30 day trial period. Signed up. Their website is horrible, and relies on emails to send you links to download the software. A real PITA. It took me several minutes to get started and download their suite. I did a custom install because I only wanted access to copy the disk.

Well, it turned out they support backing your system up to the cloud for free, but you need a paid subscription to clone an f'ing disk. I was a bit miffed.

Next up. DiskCopy. It was a very small download. I liked the simple interface. I selected the Disk. It suggested the target. I wanted it bootable. It started to run and indicated the partitioning was done, but the time went from 2 hours to 18 hours and was still climbing and suggesting access speeds reminiscent of floppies while staying at 0%. I eventually canceled it.

Next up. Disk Genius. It was a little bit larger of a download and it was a bit intimidating with all the available options. When I found the menu item for cloning the disk it was pretty simple. The only thing I didn't like was it gave you an option to swap the bootable drive, or let you configure BIOS yourself. No clear option to shutdown when it was done.

It rebooted into Windows PE to continue, I had no idea what it was, but it made sense to not have windows running while you are cloning the disk. With 2 hours and change to go, I finally turned in around 8 AM.

I woke up exhausted and checked on the machine and it had apparently rebooted instead of shutting down as I hoped it would. Since it was already in windows I checked Disk Manager and it looked like it copied everything. Powered down. Disconnected the SATA drive. Crossed my fingers and powered on.

It booted up like a champ. Uninstalled Acronis. Still working. Launched Minions of Mirth. No problems except now it is a bit too quiet:).