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Acronis TI2010 Cloning not so "raw" after all?

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Hi,

I tried to clone a truecrypt-encrypted system drive with Acronis TI Home 2010 and ended up with an unbootable drive. Although the Truecrypt bootloader popped up, nothing booted after entering password.

Afterwards, I used copywipe for the very same cloning procedure and all went just fine.

So what is Acronis missing? I thought it does a raw bit-by-bit copy? How is it different from other clone software?

thanks, regards

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When you clone from within a booted drive the copy is unencrypted. However it still has the TrueCrypt bootloader on the beginning track. So when you put it on the other drive, what you have is the bootloader that is set up to decode the encrypted data, but the data after that track is already unencrypted.

All you have to do in that case is use the TrueCrypt rescue disk to remove the bootloader and then reboot and it should boot right up. Then you can re-encrypt the drive anew.

The other option is to clone the drive from an Acronis bootable disc so it can see the whole drive and back it up sector-by-sector. This makes for a much larger image though because it has to copy the entire drive, not just the used areas of the partition.