Samsung 840 EVO - Magician/Migration doesn't recognize it

That's why you're having problems; you should have followed the 6 cartoon pictures.
You should not have put it in an external USB enclosure or format it in advance.

Remove the SSD from the enclosure and connect it to your laptop with the cable that came with it and then run Samsung Magician and see if it recognizes the drive.

If Samsung Magician recognizes the drive then Secure Erase it to restore it to a fresh-out-of-the-box condition.

Once you've SE'd the drive you can then run the data migration program.

Here's an example on ebay.com. Type "SATA to USB cable" in the search box and you can find others. http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB3-0-to-SATA-22Pin-Data-Power-Cable-Adapter-for-2-5inch-HDD-Hard-Disk-Driver-/171177909152?pt=US_Drive_Cables_dapters&hash=item27daff9ba0
I did a search on Amazon.com but didn't find any.

Dereck47 is correct, many external enclosures cause driver issues with the SSD causing the Migration program to not detect it. MAgician is made to not detect the SSD until it is plugged internally.

Hi, I am having a similar issue using windows 8. Only with my laptop it seems to be the reverse of your issue. When i plugin the SSD it is recognised by the laptop (no drive letter mapped though), then i fire up the migration software and it just says, connect ssd? I could if i wanted to map a drive letter or format the HD. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks!

I have cloned the windows partition and everything went smooth. Trying to erase the data from the old partition I noted that the files on ssd partition will be erased as well. So there is internally a link left. How to get rid of that link?

Bernhard

I have the same problem with the 840 EVO. I received it a couple of days ago and followed the instruction using the cable and software came with it. After cloning is completed I installed it in my Samsung NP300E5A laptop. It worked first time. Windows and other programs seem to run faster than before. But after a couple of boot cycling to see how fast it boot the system, the system collapsed and my laptop BIOS does not recognize the 840 EVO as SATA storage device to boot from. After replacing it with my old HDD, Windows treats the 840 EVO as an external USB drive and still the Samsung Magician is unable to find the 840 EVO in the system while the Samsung data migration program can see it and can perform the migration process. I repeated the migration process until it successfully completed and installed the SSD but it did not work, my laptop did not boot because it can not see the 840 EVO as it saw it the first time. Some thing went wrong with EVO. I am afraid something wrong happen to the EVO MBR if it has one as HDD. I checked Samsung support web page but did not find it useful (no info about such problem). I know for sure that setting the EVO to factory state will make it bootable but where is the software that can do that (the Samsung magician can not recognize the EVO). Formatting the EVO with windows will not work even if you select the option to make bootable. Other dedicated HDD utility programs might work. Did anyone try using such software for SSD?

You need to Secure Erase your 840 EVO. A Secure Erase restores any SSD to a blank, fresh-out-of-box condition.

After you SE the SSD you can then try the data migration process again.

You can SE your SSD with Samsung Magician. Since Samsung Magician does not recognize your SSD when you have it connected as an external drive, see if you can find someone with a desktop pc where you can connect the SSD to the motherboard as a secondary drive.

Read through this thread trying to find a solution. So now I am back to add my experience of Samsung 850 EVO. As many have mentioned - no there was no cable in the box. Yes I did get an enclosure rather than just the cable - the guy at MSY (love that shop) told me it was cheaper and once I am done I can turn my old HDD into another external drive. And I am on a laptop, so I only have one slot to put a hard drive in.

So rather than make the trip back to the shop (over an hours drive away) to buy the required cable, I struggled on. My solution - cloned my drive with 'EaseUS Todo Backup' (free edition). Swapped them over and now just using Samsung Magic to do the fine tuning for best performance. Took a little over an hour (I'll leave out details of all the other 'solutions' I tried and failed that took me many hours - that way I can look more like a tech guru)

I am from Canada and this week the Samsung 850 EVO 240GB is on sale. After buying one I encounter the same problem: the software won't detect the SSD inside an enclosure. The drive doesn't come with a cable and I think this is very bad on Samsung not including a cable because their software has a bug that won't detect their drive inside a regular drive enclosure, since most people will use this method to clone. Anyway I solve the problem by temporarily disconnect my DVD drive, using the ASTA/power connections to connect the SSD and it works. Hope this help people with same problem and Samsung should include a cable for all their SSDs.

You wanna use adapters, not enclosures. Enclosures have their own drivers that take over the P-n-P driver of the SSD and causes the programs to not detect the drive.

I have used a 4 year old Acorn 2.5" Eide/Sata external USB enclosure to clone 4 Samsung 840s and one 850. No issues, no special Samsung cable needed.
But, the new 850/500GB is not cloning. Gets to 100% and sits there. Latest release. Tried a 3rd party cloner. All the data clones but freezes at the end. Not bootable. Seems to hang when it should be copying boot sectors. Lovely. Now playing with magician. If it doesn't help, I will return the drive.

This from Samsung support - images won't paste--too bad.
Please follow these troubleshooting instructions to reset and clone to the SSD:

Confirm that you are connecting your SSD via SATA to USB or internally to a SATA3 port on your motherboard if you are doing this for a desktop computer.

Open the Run dialog by pressing the START and R buttons simultaneously, type in Diskpart, and then press enter. Then enter these syntax commands to perform a clean of the drive:

a. List disk (This will list the disk information along with a disk number)

b. Select disk # (The # symbol I have written in this line is representative of number of the disk the SSD was listed as in the previous command. For example, you would type: Select Disk 0 if the SSD was listed as Disk 0)

c. Clean (this command will wipe the entire contents of the selected drive)

d. Exit the Command Prompt

Please note that the below screen shots are only to assist you and not direct directions
How to Initialize and Format in Disk Management

1. Get to Disk Management :
Go to Start. RIGHT Click on Computer, go to Manage, then select Disk Management.

Windows 8 uses the Windows key and X then click on Disk Management


2. You should get a window popup like this:


If so choose the default that was already there and click OK.
FYI: GPT allows you to create more than 4 partitions on the HDD and 2.2TB+ sized partitions as well.

If you didn't get the popup then right click and select initialize the newly added drive under where it says the Disk # shown below:



Now right click the unallocated space and click create a New Simple Volume shown below:


Follow the on screen wizard by clicking Next


Specify your volume size, default is fine, and now click Next


Assign any drive letter you wish to the drive and click Next


Format the partition and name the volume, default settings are fine

Now click Finish.


Note: If a clone fails, you will have to do the format again (#5-9). When it fails, it resets the volume back to an Uninitialized state. Drives must be initialized and formatted for any date to be place upon them

Now that it is initialized and formatted, you can use our cloning software. If our software continues to give you an error, you may want to consider a third party application in lieu of our Data Migration. The Magician software is to be installed onto the SSD once the operating system is running on it.

Should you need a direct download of Samsung software (Magician and /or Migration), go to http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/downloads.html


You are not obligated to use any of Samsung’s SSD software. If you have issues with our Migration Software, you can feel free to use any third party application of your choice. We cannot and will not make any recommendations / suggestions for 3rd party software. Simply using an internet search of Free Cloning Tools will give you dozens of choices.


If you have any other questions, please feel free to email us right away. To call us, our support hours are from 9am-9pm EST Monday to Friday. We can be contacted at 1-800-726-7864. Please use the phone prompts of 1 for consumer, 1 for first time caller (you always will be), 4 for computer department, 5 for Drives / memory devices, 1 for SSD. Please do not speed through these phone prompts or you will be transferred to general devices.

Thank you again for contacting Samsung Support and have a good day.

I also bought this Samsung 840EVO 250GB SSD but my intention was rather simple: I wanted an external drive, USB3.0 speed, which backed up and copied files faster than the normal mechanical drives. SSD speed as I read was exactly what I had been looking for. I have to say, it is indeed small and light, and now that I managed to install it, it is absolutely beautifully fast.

Same case as everybody else, the drive didn't come with a cable, and I started looking for alternatives, and similar to many people I bought a drive enclosure, USB3.0 that worked with SSD up to 6TB, and mine being only 250GB, it could work well (I naively thought)...

Well, it may sound really silly and obvious, and stupid for many of you geeks, but as I built this little wonder inside this enclosure, which was extremely simple, of course it comes unformatted, and all I needed was to format it.

As I plugged it to my blue USB3.0, the only one in my laptop, nothing came up, no hint, and I could not see it immediately, so used I was to always "plug and play". The drive did show a lit led, and looked to be ok and working, but no new letter in the "my computer" explorer.

All I needed to have done, as you all will have guessed, was to open "Computer Management" then see the drive there, then choose from unformatted drive, choose GPT or MBR (I chose the former, as I read that if you don't intend to make loads of partitions then it is preferrable), formatted it as Basic Disk (as opposed to Dynamic Disk) and NTFS (as opposed to FAT32 or even FAT16).

My super-speed experienced started there and then! Formatting it was super fast! When copying from a mechanical hardrive your bottleneck will be that drive speed, but SSD experience is great!

I hope this helps some of you... Ciao

Hi tjohn. Thank you for these detailed instructions.
During the format step, is a Quick Format okay, or must one uncheck that checkbox?

I am asking because I am wrongly getting the "Please connect a Samsung SSD" message trying to run the Data Migration application on a Windows 10 laptop's 500GB HDD to an EVO850. I have successfully migrated a Windows 8.1 laptop's EVO840 to this very same EVO850 in the past, with no troubles, so I know how to use the software and I am confident I have the right cable. And the EVO850 shows up in Windows Explorer as drive D and so I could easily see files on it too. And so I carefully followed your procedure below, thinking perhaps resetting to factory would help, but I still got the "Please connect a Samsung SSD".
Are there any issues with Windows 10 versus Windows 8.1 with using the Data Migration application?
OR is it possible I should choose MBR instead of GPT?
Also some people in this thread are talking about Secure Erase. Is that something I should do, and if so how does one do that?

Samsung's tools don't support Windows 10 yet. Wait for an update.

Thank you palorim. So are you saying that there is a known issue where Data Migration on Windows 10 will always wrongly give the message "Please Connect A Samsung SSD" whenever any Samsung SSD is attached?
And when is Data Migration scheduled to be compatible with Windows 10?
And is it possible I should choose MBR instead of GPT?
And, Windows 10 aside, is a Secure Erase ever helpful in overcoming this error message?
And, regarding Windows 10, how am I ever going to get migrated to my new Samsung SSD bootable in Windows 10, seeing as the Windows 10 upgrade was an online update?

Thank you,
David

You got alot of questions there.

I numbered your questions and I'm gonna answer in order.

1. Yes
2. Dunno, Samsung support said sometime in August, but gave no specific date.
3. If your cloning, you have to use the one that the source drive is set to. The only way to change from MBR to GPT and run the OS would be a clean install, since switching from MBR to GPT and vice versa require a reformat.
4. Secure Erase Factory resets the drive, so no.
5 Use a different cloning program that already supports Windows 10.

Thank you for both your speed and precise answering.
So, based on your answers, I have a plan...
A. I can somehow figure out if the source drive is MBR rather than GPT and if it is MBR then try again with target drive MBR (do you know how I can figure out which the source drive is?). And if that doesn't work then...
B. I mount both the source Windows 10 HDD drive and the target Windows SDD drive as external drives (using two USB-SATA cables) on a Windows 8.1 machine that is running Samsung Data Migration... and do the migration that way. Can you see any flaws with that plan?
C. Otherwise do you know of any other cloning programs that could support Windows 10?

My cloning worked on windows 10 for 850 evo 500gb but my 250 gb one isn't recognized...

I have exactly the same issues on a Windows 10, the Target disk (SSD 500 GB) not visible (the source is a 250 GB SSD). I hope a suitable update for Windows 10 will come soon and solve the problem.

same problem here, Windows 10 with hdd trying to mirgate to 1tb samsung evo ssd

but I solved it I managed to migrate: i used this tool http://www.disk-partition.com/download-home.html

I had to buy the pro version , because my hdd had to many partitions, that made it more complicated but it worked in the end