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Clone disk on Truecrypt encrypted system partition deletes MBR & fails

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Hi,
Running win7 x64 and truecrypt 7.1a, with the whole system drive encrypted.

I want to clone the internal laptop drive to a 100% identical drive in the expansion bay, using the clone disk option in ATIH2012.

I used to do this under winXP and (I think) acronis 2010 version just fine, it worked great.

Now under 2012, I go thru the same steps (clone disk, select source & dest drives, then proceed - it asks to reboot). But once it reboots, I get an MBR error and the system won't boot. I have to use the TC rescue disk to restore the TC MBR, effectively aborting the cloning.

Anyone doing this successfully with similar versions? I basically am looking for a way to have a 100% identical copy of my laptop drive that is bootable.

Thanks,
Tim

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Tim,
Support for encryption software is limited using most backup products, but with that said, you should try cloning with the bootable Recovery Disk or USB stick to perfom a cloning operation. Usually it is best to put the destination drive into the laptop, and the source drive in the expansion bay prior to cloning. When finished, you can then boot the system to see if everything works. If so you can then put the orignal drive back into the laptop, and have a working cloned disk as well. Be very careful when cloning using the Recovery disk/USB stick as the drive letters will be different then in Windows (check volume names, capities, etc.) If you happen to clone a blank destination drive to the source, you will have two blank drives. The problem you are seeing is that Acronis is writing to the boot track/MBR to perform the clone since you are trying to do this from within Windows and it needs to restart your system to a recovery enviroment to clone an active system partition. The Recovery Disk/USB stick method will not write to the source drive, only read from it.

Hi James,
Thanks for the reply.

Main thing I'm trying to understand is why this behavior changed from what I was doing under XP and an older version of acronis. This worked great under XP which is why I purchased the 2012 version of acronis to do the same under win 7. Do you know if there's some way to prevent acronis from overwriting the MBR in this scenario (I don't see any options like that).

To elaborate: on XP, I'd choose clone disk, source was the internal HDD, destination was an identical drive in an expansion bay (this is a thinkpad W500), it would force a reboot, it'd come up to the TC bootloader & I'd enter my password, then it would load into a kind of acronis environment where it would clone the drive. This was what I was expecting under acronis 2012 & win 7 as well :(

I don't mind if I need to do some additional work/repair on the TARGET drive if for whatever reason I actually need to boot from it, but I definitely don't want to remove the source drive from the laptop nor do I want to have to do any repair on it to get it to boot every time I clone the disk (my heart was in my throat when this happened the first time luckily I was able to restore the TC bootloader using the TC rescue disk and it booted fine).

Thanks,
Tim

Tim,

James F recommendation to use the recovery CD is key to success here. If I were you, I would decrypt the disk, do the clone, verify that everything is fine, then reencrypt.

Hi Pat,

Thanks for the reply. Couple things:

- this is a 750G drive. To encrypt or decrypt this disk takes 15 hours. It's just not a feasible solution.

- removing the main drive from the system is not really feasible either - it's quite inconvenient to do so.

- I'm a bit unclear on why this has changed from previous versions of acronis, ie, why does the 2012 version modify the MBR on the source disk while the older (I think it was 2010) version does not?

Basically I had been using this technique to back up the entire drive every 2 weeks. Now I need to either find a way to make the 2012 version work like the previous version, or find some other better software app that can achieve this. :(

Thanks!
Tim

So a follow up idea/question:

Can you perform a sector-by-sector clone disk operation from within the Acronis bootable rescue media? I'm thinking I could boot from a rescue disk on USB while still having the source & destination drives in place. It'd have to be on USB as I can't have the DVD ROM & the destination HDD in the system at the same time (they go in the same expansion bay).

That could be workable, just plug in the USB with acronis on it and boot from that. Any thoughts?

Thanks!
Tim

Yes. Boot on the recovery CD and do a sector by sector backup.

Unfortunately, for some reason I am having a problem with this. I booted into the recovery CD (from USB) with both drives in place. I can see both drives, I can select the source drive, but in the destination drive selection screen, both disk 1 & 2 are grayed out and I cannot select the second drive as a destination, preventing me from proceeding. Any idea what would cause that?

Thanks!
Tim

Since you are cloning to an identical disk, it cannot be a size issue.

Did you try to "add new disk" first? (make sure you select the right disk since driver letters are not necessarily the same as in Windows.

truly speaking i wish tim stevenson way of cloning would have still worked....i used to do it exactly the same way and now things see so so more complicated

I tried the "add disk" option, it didn't change anything. At this point, I think I've just wasted my money on this software. Norton Ghost messed this up a couple years back which is why I changed to Acronis. Oh well, on to some better software I guess. For anyone doing encrypted disk cloning - save your money, cuz Acronis doesn't work.

Tim