Although technology has allowed SSDs to have greater durability , as you well know, they still have a limit in terms of writes and erasures of their memory chips, so they end up reaching the end of their useful life sooner or later. When that time comes they go into write-protected mode (or read-only mode), but that doesn’t mean you’ve lost your data. In this article, we are going to show you how to clone an SSD that is in read-only mode so that you can recover all your data and continue working normally.
As the name suggests, entering an SSD into read-only or write-protected mode means that no more data can be written to its memory, but the data can still be accessed in read-only mode. This means that if the SSD was your system disk, surely the PC will no longer boot, but you can always connect the SSD as a secondary disk and access its data to take it elsewhere, which is what we are going to teach you to do here.
What to do with a write-protected SSD?
At the point that the SSD has reached the end of its useful life and is in read-only mode, you have several options, but in all of them you must bear in mind that that SSD will no longer be able to use it and you will need to buy another .
If you had the SSD as a secondary device, what you can do is as simple as connect another additional SSD in the computer and copy the data from one to another, but the problem comes when the SSD that has been put in read-only mode it was the system boot device, as the operating system will not be able to boot. In this case, your options are reduced to cloning the SSD (for which you should have done some previous steps) using software, using a friend’s PC to do it, or cloning it with a hardware dock.
How to clone SSD to a new one
If your SSD is 2.5-inch format you have it easier, because you will only need a cloning dock that you can buy for less than 30 euros in stores. Just plug the old SSD into the dock’s source port (source) and the new SSD into the target port of the same device, press the copy button and simply wait for the copy to finish. When it does, simply install the new SSD where you had the old one and you will find everything as you had it, since a cloning will have been done.
If the SSD that you have write-protected is in M.2 format, the options are greatly reduced. You could buy an external case for M.2 SSDs with a USB connection that have a price of around 20 euros to connect it, although you can do the same if your motherboard has several M.2 sockets available to connect the SSDs, but in in any case you will have to do it through software. To do this, you will also need a USB pen drive (since we also assume that it was the bootable SSD and the PC will “not work” without it).
The first thing you should do is download Tuxboot (on another PC, like a friend’s, if yours doesn’t start up because of the SSD), a free software that will automatically download Clonezilla and turn the pen drive into a bootable device so that it can be can start the PC from it. Run Tuxboot once you have it downloaded and at the top select “On-Line distribution” clonezilla_live_stable and current, which are the parameters that come by default . At the bottom, select USB Drive in Type and in Drive select the letter of the drive where you have the USB pendrive connected (logically you will have to connect it before).
Once the process is finished, you will have to boot the PC where you have both the old and the new SSD connected to start the cloning process. When it starts up, a screen like the one you see below will appear, in which you must select the first option.
Then you will enter a wizard, in which you must select the following options:
- Spanish language (es_ES.ITF-8 Spanish).
- Start Clonezilla.
- Device-device (Disk / Partition to Disk / Partition).
- Local disk to cloned local disk
- In this section, you must select the source disk, generally the one labeled as sda.
- In the next, select the destination disk, usually sdb.
- Okay
- Check and repair interactively.
- Use the partition table of the source disk.
After this it will show a summary of everything and after pressing Y and ENTER the cloning process will begin.
When finished it will ask us if we want to clone the bootloader as well; press Y and ENTER again to say yes.
Now we just have to wait for it to finish. When it does, you can shut down your computer and install the new cloned SSD on your PC.