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Cloning from AHCI SATA HD to IDE... will the cloned HD work as boot disk?

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Dear Acronis Forum,

Let's suppose there is a PC with BIOS AHCI active and SSD as boot disk running over SATA connection obviously.
The OS (XP or Win 7) fully recognizes the setup as working .

The idea is to have a clone of that SSD for emergencies.

If the available HD for cloning that SSD is an IDE drive (not SATA), TrueImage will be maybe able to clone SSD-->IDE disk successfully...but will the cloned IDE HD work at the next boot? Or TrueImage will say: "hey that cloned disk will not boot at all so it will not continue the cloning"?

My concerns are about the fact that AHCI works with SATA drives with Bios enabled; so I don't know what will be the final result of such a cloning procedure and whether there are tricks in order to make it working anyway.

Thank you.

Best regards,
J.

0 Users found this helpful

If your disk controller is the same for IDE and SATA mode (the case of relatively modern computers), it should boot. The best way is to to do the clone from the recovery CD, and to switch the BIOS from SATA to IDE for the clone operation.

But instead of doing a clone, why don't you produce a disk image of your SATA drive that your store on any disk you want? Why cloning?

It is possible to prep Windows 7/8 registry so that it will always load either an IDE or AHCI driver depending in the drives it finds, but it does require changing two registry entries.

Pat L,

Thank you for your reply.
Running the clone from a recovery CD would not be the best handy solution. I would prefer to use directly the Windows procedure; so let's hope it will work.
The reason to clone a disk is to be able to boot from the cloned HD (IDE in this case) in case of emergency; clearly an image is not able to that simply changing the first loaded HD in the BIOS setting.