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TruImage made my original drive unbootable

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Used 2014 to clone the drive on a new Acer laptop. I probably missed a setting somewhere, but now the laptop won't boot. Won't even boot from the CD drive.

Looks like the clone is a complete image.

Is there an easy way to reset the original drive's boot record, or should I try cloning the original from the clone and see what happens?

2014 was installed on the now dead Acer. I have TruImage 11 on the old laptop, but when I tried to use 11 on the new laptop it balked, something about dynamic discs. Don't know if the clone is also a dynamic disc and will require 2014, and don't know how to tell.

Any info greatly appreciated.

Thanks

al

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Al,

Did you clone using the recvery CD or from within Windows?

Acer might (assuming W8 as the OS) have a non standard sector layout. Try 'reverse' cloning, put the new drive into the laptop and the old source drive into the external caddy and then clone external to internal.

I have to say, I believe making a full disk image (requires another drive) is the less troublesome and more flexible route to take.

The clone was from within windows.

The new drive is a USB external, and it's not really practical to put it into the laptop.

The OS is Win7Pro - I'm not going to go W8 just yet, although the laptop has it as a recovery option..

So if I can reverse clone, it would have to be new clone external to old original, now pulled from the laptop and also an external. And I'd be doing it on a different computer (obviously) and would have to install on that to make it happen.

Foresee any problems with that?

Thanks

al

Why would you clone to an external USB HD? You cannot normally boot to Windows from such a drive. If it is a raw drive that is removeable from the USB enclosure, then I can see the purpose, but clone is still a risky proposition with no benefit over a backup and restore.

Clone should be used only by advanced users who know what they are doing. It is riskier and can result in a loss of data and a failed system. Create a full disk mode backup and restore it, using the bootable Rescue Media, to the new disk, as it's far safer.

My best advice: Do not Clone! Instead, do one extra step and create a full disk Backup to an external drive. If ever you need to return to that image state, you would do a full disk Restore/Recovery.

There is rarely a need to Clone. Really, Backup is safer and more flexible. Many users encounter problems Cloning which they would not have if they had instead used Backup.

1. Don't use Clone. Do a full disk mode Backup, selecting the entire disk, and a Restore. The end result will be the same as Clone, but with many advantages.

2. Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots.
In particular, 29618: Grover's new backup and restore guides http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618

A full disk backup, selecting the disk checkbox rather than individual partitions, includes everything. It includes everything that a clone would include.

The difference is that while a clone immediately writes that information a single time to another drive, a backup is saved as a compressed .tib archive. As such, multiple .tib archives may be saved to a single backup drive, allowing for greater redundancy, security and flexibility.

Once a full disk image .tib archive is restored to a drive, the result is the same as if that drive had been the target of a clone done on the date and time that the backup archive was created.

Clone is riskier because we've seen situations where users mistakenly choose the wrong drive to clone from and to, thus wiping out their system drive.

(a) - the purpose of the clone was to get a copy of the drive that I could access individual files from. I've been doing it for years. I mostly do it when I'm moving stuff to a new computer, but I also do it to have a copy of the hard drive that I can restore from outside an operating system. Maybe it's not the safest or smartest thing to do, but it's worked for me for close to 20 years.

(b) that's all beside the current point, which is how to get a bootable drive for this new laptop, either by making the original drive bootable or by doing something creative with either the non-bootable original or the external USB clone of that drive.

Thanks for the input. I'll keep your advise in mind once I get past this current challenge.

al

Cloning should not have any impact onthe source disk. If you indeed have a successfully cloned image onthe traget, you could clone it back to the source but I doubt that you do sinc ethe source disk seems to be altered.

You might have cloned in the wrong direction, from external to the internal, in which case you disk is wiped clean of what was there before --one of hte biggests risks of using cloning.

If not you can possibly use a windows repair disk and either repair (not injurious to existing data) or restore (basically reinstalls windows).

Before do ing that, go into BIOS and make sure boot settings are correct to boot from the internal hdisk.

Just to update: After pulling the battery and the hard drive, I gave up and left the laptop sit overnight. Put it back together this morning and it booted up as normal.

When the laptop wouldn't boot, the F2 that normally accesses BIOS also didn't work. I had a bootable recovery disc in the CD drive, and the BIOS had been set to first boot from the CD, but that didn't happen either. All seems to be back to normal this morning. Must have been a capacitor holding a charge that was able to drain off overnight.

Complicating things may have been that this laptop can be recovered into either W7 or W8. W7 required BIOS, W8 requires UFCI. TI seems to detect the W8 somehow even with W7 as the installed OS.

But as the situation seems to have been resolved, the motivation on this end to dig deeper is evaporating.

But I'll probably not attempt to clone this drive again . . .

Thanks all . . .

al

Pulling the battery might have helped. Sometimes it's the best way to ensure a cold boot. Could be a hardware issue so keep an eye open for it.

Btw, there is no capacitor in a laptop that won't lose it's charge in millisecs after removing the power source.

Now that you seem to have it running, I'd make a full disk mode backup on the the external drive and do so every so often (days, weeks, depending on how much data you can afford to lose). You can undoubtedly fit many backups onthe disk, which provides you with extra security that a clone can't provide. Yes, restoring form a clone is faster in those raare instances where you need to replace a drive. but against that you have all the reasons stated fo making backups instead. With a clone, you're putting all your egges in one basket and then sitting on the basket ;)

good luck