SOS: Am I cloning incorrectly?

[George Tyndall]

I booted with my Acronis disc and then followed the simple procedure to clone to a second internal SATA drive.

I then unplugged the source drive, booted, and all I get is a flashing cursor.

When I rebooted with the Acronis disc, it informed me that the cloned HDD is now my C drive, and there is a check in the box to the left of it. Under Flags it says "Pri/Act."

[Peru]

Take out the boot disc, turn off the computer, and disconnect the clone (target) drive. Reconnect the original drive to the power cable and the same SATA port that it was originally connected. The machine should boot normally now.

Shut down the machine as normal. Leave the original drive as is. Connect the target drive to a SATA port and power port. Don't use the boot disc. Start up the machine, and when fully booted, open Acronis. Find the option to "Manage Hard Disks" and choose "Clone Disk". Follow the directions, being careful that the source (original) disk and target (clone) disks are correctly selected.

What version of Acronis are you using?

[George Tyndall]

Leave the original drive as is. Connect the target drive to a SATA port and power port. Don't use the boot disc. Start up the machine, and when fully booted, open Acronis.

With both the original and the target drives plugged in and then booting without the Acronis disc, won't my machine fail to boot as it won't know which drive to boot from?

[Peru]

It has an order set in the BIOS from where to boot first. The default is usually set to boot from the disc drive first. If no operating system is detected, it goes to the next drive listed (usually the C: drive) and so on.

If you didn't change any settings, it should work fine.

If you want to go to the BIOS, give your system specs and model computer and we can find out the key to hit to enter the BIOS.

[George Tyndall]

It has an order set in the BIOS from where to boot first. The default is usually set to boot from the disc drive first. If no operating system is detected, it goes to the next drive listed (usually the C: drive) and so on.

When I power on with the Acronis boot disc in the drive, which I've always done since I acquired the machine, I'm given the choice of booting either with the Acronis disc or with Windows (there are 2 buttons to choose from). The only time I choose Acronis is when I wish to a) create a Backup (mirror image) b) perfom a Restore (from the image) or c) now, for the first time, create a Clone.

Problem now is that, with the original C drive disconnected and only the cloned drive connected, when I power on with the Acronis disc in the drive as always and then choose to boot not with Acronis but with Windows, I get only a flashing cursor.

Are you saying that booting with the Acronis disc not in the drive will give me a different result, in other words, that I should be able to boot from the newly-created clone?

I'm not at the location of the machine at present but will be no later than 9pm Peru time, and I'll post the result (but not sure if you will be still awake).

Thank you.

[Peru]

Are you saying that booting with the Acronis disc not in the drive will give me a different result, in other words, that I should be able to boot from the newly-created clone?

If the clone was created properly, don't use the disc. Remove the SATA connection from the original drive and connect it to the correctly created clone. Then turn on the computer. If the clone was successfully created, it will boot exactly like the original. After all, it's a clone. That is its job. It's an exact copy of the original.

[George Tyndall]

Are you saying that booting with the Acronis disc not in the drive will give me a different result, in other words, that I should be able to boot from the newly-created clone?

If the clone was created properly, don't use the disc. Remove the SATA connection from the original drive and connect it to the correctly created clone. Then turn on the computer. If the clone was successfully created, it will boot exactly like the original. After all, it's a clone. That is its job. It's an exact copy of the original.

After powering on, I pressed Esc and was offered three choices to boot from: the two (empty) DVD drives and the cloned HDD. I selected the latter, then exited--and then the black screen with flashing cursor appeared, same as before. That leads me to believe the clone was not "created properly."

Another reason to think so is that my original 1TB C drive consisted of 600GB whereas the cloned 2TB drive shows only 300GB in size.

So I'm now going to shut down, disconnect the cloned drive, and reconnect the original drive.

All back to normal, so it's a failure of Acronis to do its job on the Automatic ("Recommended") setting for cloning.



I am going to try again later with my Paragon program. I'll post the result later.

[Peru]

Goerge,

Before you give up on Acronis, did you try this way that I suggested earlier?

Take out the boot disc, turn off the computer, and disconnect the clone (target) drive. Reconnect the original drive to the power cable and the same SATA port that it was originally connected. The machine should boot normally now.

Shut down the machine as normal. Leave the original drive as is. Connect the target drive to a SATA port and power port. Don't use the boot disc. Start up the machine, and when fully booted, open Acronis. Find the option to "Manage Hard Disks" and choose "Clone Disk". Follow the directions, being careful that the source (original) disk and target (clone) disks are correctly selected.

You really should only use the disc when you can't boot the machine normally, such as when your hard drive has failed.

[George Tyndall]

did you try this way that I suggested earlier?

No I didn't, Peru, as it seemed you were giving me instructions re how to clone a disk from a source disk when that is what I had already done. I guess I minsunderstood you. What I in fact did was what is suggested in in the Acronis documentation: After creating the clone, I powered on with only the cloned drive connected--and without using the Acronis disc--but all I got was a flashing cursor.

So instead, I've gone ahead and created a clone with Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 11, which I've used with success in the past, which is faster, and which has a much better interface.

Once I've verified that the clone to the second internal SATA drive is functional, for extra security I am going to also create a backup of the source disc on an external HDD drive that I will keep at a separate location from the machine.

I'll let you know later whether Paragon-cloned drive is functional.

Thanks again for your assistance.

[George Tyndall]

I'll let you know later whether Paragon-cloned drive is functional.

Well, I was able to boot from the cloned drive--but only after running the System Repair Disk for Win 7.

And then, when the desktop appeared, it looked nothing like I get with the source drive. In fact, it looks like the clone that I created last year.

So, I will be resorting to the Backup and Restore technique that I've used in the past and that, although it requires patience, has always worked perfectly.

Thanks again for your assistance.

[Peru]

George-

I think you should format the clone drive so that you can have a fresh start at cloning. Either there is a problem with that drive, or it didn't really clone properly.

[Chuck Engels]

Whenever I clone my drive it is always formatted before the cloning starts. I will usually format the drive myself to save time but if I don't the software will do it for me.

[George Tyndall]

Peru and Chuck, Paragon did inform me that it would delete all the content of the target drive during the cloning process, so I was very surprised to see what appeared to be a previous clone appear.

Anyway, at the risk of meeting Einstein's definition of insanity, I decided to retry but this time using a different pulldown menu.

After completing the process, Paragon informed me that the size of each of the three partitions on the cloned drive was identical to the three on the source drive, so I was very excited to restart.

Upon restart, I held down the Esc key to choose the drive to boot from, chose the cloned drive and...

...still once again got the flashng cursor and nothing else.

So, I restarted and booted with the original drive, and here I am without a clue what to do next but confident I am close to a solution.

Suggestions, please.

[George Tyndall]

Here is some additional information.

Disk Management informs me that:

"The [cloned] disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online."

Help informs me that I can bring the disk online by right-clicking on it, but I am not sure I should do that.

[George Tyndall]

Goerge,

Before you give up on Acronis, did you try this way that I suggested earlier?

Take out the boot disc, turn off the computer, and disconnect the clone (target) drive. Reconnect the original drive to the power cable and the same SATA port that it was originally connected. The machine should boot normally now.

Shut down the machine as normal. Leave the original drive as is. Connect the target drive to a SATA port and power port. Don't use the boot disc. Start up the machine, and when fully booted, open Acronis. Find the option to "Manage Hard Disks" and choose "Clone Disk". Follow the directions, being careful that the source (original) disk and target (clone) disks are correctly selected.

You really should only use the disc when you can't boot the machine normally, such as when your hard drive has failed.

I've done all the above, and Acronis informs me that it cannot perform the action because it needs two disks but sees only one.

Should I go to Disk Management and right-click on the "Offline" drive to bring it online, which I believe will assign a drive letter to it, then repeat the procedure that you describe?