destination disk selection grayed out!

Eric,

Are you trying to clone from within Windows or from the recovery CD? If from within Windows (not recommended) you could try using the True Image 'Add Disk' utility and then see if it can see the drive. It is better to clone from the recovery CD so that Windows cannot lock any files or RAM space.

Is the 2TB drive a hybrid one?

When you accessed the 2TB drive was it attached to the same USB port? It might be worth trying a different port or caddy.

What will probably work is to swap the drive positions, put the source drive into the external caddy and the new drive into the PC and reverse clone booting from the Recovery CD.

Hi Colin,

Thanks for replying.

I have tried both from within windows vista64 and boot up using the boot media CD. Both have given me the same result.
The 2TB is pure SATA disk drive not hybrid.
I have also tried different USB port.

I have also tried the clone process using a different computer running windows 7. The same result. Destination drive greyed out.

I seriously think there is a flaw in the software program. If it is not a flaw, it has to be design issue.

I am frustrated and disappointed with the program. Why? I have been reading about the same issues that other people has encountered.

Regards,
el.

Hi Eric, Colin,
I have purchased TI 2013 for the same reason as above and have exactly the same issue. Why I think that it is definitely a software/product issue is that I have done exactly the same 'cloning' function from a 500GB, x4 partition drive to a WD 1TB (staging) drive. This worked just as the documentation says. All I want to do is exactly the same from the WD 1TB to a WD 2TB which is going into a NAS drive.
All seems OK until I get to the 'Destination Drive' section which is ALWAYS greyed out!!
This is so frustrating and now I feel that i have wasted my money and am looking for freeware Linux cloning tools like Ping or others like Odin..
Anyone who can assist or knows what the problem is please could you let me know?
Neil..

Why would you Clone to an NAS? You can't boot Windows from an NAS. If there is some purpose, please explain it.

You would be better to do a full disk mode Backup.

Better to read the following link that will explain it better than I could: -

http://www.gkspk.com/view/techie/upgrade-hdd-buffalo-linkstation-ls-gl-…

Its to upgrade the disk from a 500GB to 2TB. I have outgrown the smaller disk and this seemed the logical option without replacing the entire device.
Would have been simple had the second stage of my cloning worked!!
Cheers

I am having the same problem as well..

Trying to clone from a 500gb to a 1tb drive.

I get a message saying "Failed to move the selected data. Make sure that your new hard drive is not smaller than your old one and that your partitions do not contain errors. You can check for errors and correct them using a special utility."

I have used Acronis countless times in the past with previous versions, with no problem.

So apparently there REALLY is something wrong in this release.

I, too, am having this problem. I just want to clone my laptop's hard drive to a new drive, as the old one is dying. I have the new drive connected via a USB-to-SATA adapter, and my computer can see it. I've tried the "add new device" multiple times and always the drive shows up when I have to choose a source drive, and is grayed out when I have to choose the target drive.

I even bought the software thinking the free Seagate DiskWizard might not be able to do this, but the licensed True Image 2013 is doing the exact same thing.

I never got to the bottom of the problem but I am disappointed with this new version of Acronis 2013. I used an older version for XP which was just amazing and recovered and upgraded HD's on numerous occasions with no problem.
With regard to the above I dumped the cloning option and found my NAS actually had to intelligence to see a new drive/problem and was able to rebuild all the necessary partitions it's self. I then copied all the data I had on the old drive manually from a back up drive.

Like everyone else here I have v2013 and am trying to clone a 4TB internal HDD to a USB external HDD of the same size. Once I select the internal drive to clone from, the external one greys out and nothing useful can be selected. This is really silly. Even if a smaller size it SHOULD continue as long as the data fits, but its not smaller. I note that my other internal 4TB rives that are the same size are not greyed out, only the external HDD in a case. Could this be of any less use?
I am using Win7, all updates, 64Bit.
I went and found a free portable app and its now in the process of cloning these disks right now. So why cant acronis do it?

I had the same issue where all of my partitions were grayed out. I was on the phone for 2 hours with Acronis support and they couldn't figure it out. I think there's a bug and it won't let you restore to a smaller drive/partition even if the used space fits on the smaller drive. Everything worked fine if the partition was the same size or larger. If anyone can figure out how to get around this, I'd appreciate a response. I couldn't restore my backup to an SSD drive.

Also suffering from this issue. I had a True Image 2013 daily backup set up to a NAS and then the hard drive died.

I therefore replaced the 2,5" 250GB Harddisk with a 2,5" 120GB Solid-State-Disk and wanted to restore to this SSD using the latest Acronis Rescue CD (True Image 2013 German, Build 6514).

However, no matter what I did, the destination remained grey and nothing I did was able to change that (fearing that it might have to do with something that was previously on the SSD, I wiped the drive, reinitialized it as MBR). The backups filesystem was in a consistent state (certainly not a sector-by-sector backup) and of the 250GB only a little above 50GB was actually in use.

That such a basic functionality of True Image doesn't work is quite a bug. Wonder if that never came up during testing or if someone said "ah, too much trouble to fix this, let's put it on the list for TI 2014".

I suspect Acronis was trying to be 'smart' and grayed out drives where the restore wouldn't fit. However they seem to be looking at total size of the original drive, not the actual usage. That was a huge oversight. They advertise you can restore this way and their support representative was trying to tell me how to do it. It's clearly a bug in my mind. I was lucky enough to catch this when I bought the software and was able to get a refund. If it ever gets fixed, I'd appreciate it if someone posted it here. I still may go back to Acronis since it gets good reviews. For now, I had to go elsewhere since this feature was important to me.

I don't think it has anything to do with the size of the second drive. I have tried to backup to a drive that is 250 GB larger, physically, not just the amount of free space, and the same thig happened.

What program did you find?

What program did you find?

Ouch. For me, it was just a problem with smaller drives. I assumed I could restore to a larger drive, shrink the partition, and then restore the smaller partition to the smaller drive. Sounds like that wouldn't work. Is there any workaround? How do you get the backup restored?

DKump wrote:

Ouch. For me, it was just a problem with smaller drives. ... How do you get the backup restored?

No idea. I am so frustrated. I am not doing a backup and restore, just trying to clone my drive before it dies (don't even get me started on the fact that a two-year old drive is dying!).

E wrote:

I am not doing a backup and restore, just trying to clone my drive before it dies (don't even get me started on the fact that a two-year old drive is dying!).

You would be better to do a full disk mode Backup.

And, if that drive is dying, stop using it!
The more you use it the more likely you will permanently lose data. Use the ATI bootable Rescue Media to create the backup.

Oh I have also done a complete backup (sorry, I should have said that), that is just not what I am trying to do *now*. I tried booting from a disk but still had trouble. I will try that again. After that, it is off to the hole-in-the-wall computer shop.

E wrote:

I don't think it has anything to do with the size of the second drive. I have tried to backup to a drive that is 250 GB larger, physically, not just the amount of free space, and the same thig happened.

For me, a bigger destination drive solved it. I was trying to do a restore from a NAS storage, not a cloning (which is what I gather you are trying to do).
Due to the Acronis problems I had to replace a broken 250GB HDD with a 480GB SSD. Slight waste of money. I will have to shrink this sometime next week and recover my valuable 480GB SSD from this box. Had no other choice but to use the 480GB SSD - system had to work again ASAP.

I just fought this same battle. My situation was a dying 5400RPM 320GB drive in a laptop, being replaced with a 320GB SSD. Everytime I selected the new drive as a destination disk the drive was greyed out and unselectable. I used the Add New Disk wizard to create both MBR and GPT partition tables, tried using Windows to create a partition, tried with no disk init. done at all without success.

What fixed it for me was the drive connector - I was using a SATA--> USB adapter cable kit. I dismantled my small HDD enclosure and used that instead of the kit and the drive was then selectable as a destination. So, my advice is to try and mount up both HDDs as SATA and if you absolutely have to use USB then have a secondary USB connector ready just in case.

I've never had issues attaching a drive via USB with this kit before so I found this quite odd. Must be my kit dying on me.

ON the failed attempt, was the SSD mounted inside the computer (as Acronis recommended) prior to receiving the clone with the dying disk being mounted outside?

Dying SSD was inside the laptop and not touched yet. I always mount drive that is the destination via USB. No reason other than laziness (if it doesn't work, I don't need to disassemble)

Same for me. The destination was attached via USB.

Try placing the destination drive inside the PC in the same position that the current drive is in and the current drive externally.

Some BIOS's require this setup so that manufacturers drive layouts can be copied across correctly.

Maybe applicable elsewhere. In my case simply changing USB controllers was enough to get it to work.

Just want to endorse the last posters fix - I was also using a multipurpose powered USB adapter for a SATA SSD, and having the same experience as everyone else - the external SSD was grayed out and could not be selected. After reading this post I grabbed an external USB SATA enclosure that I had (non-powered) and put the SSD in that. Then it was fine, and I'm able to clone to the external SSD.

A couple of other notes -

This is the third SATA clone I've done recently, one on a Kingston where I used EaseUS because the drive came with no software, one on a Samsung that came with it's own disk for cloning, and this one - a Crucial that came with a license key for Acronis. The Acronis was the only one that didn't work first time, out of the box, using my USB-SATA adapter. Given that it came with the drive, that's kind of a bummer.

Also, I don't see the need to move your drive inside your machine and boot from a recovery disk. None of the others even mentioned that. Each just "did the right thing" with the external SSD, fixing partitions, cloning the drive, and making it bootable. After that, I just replaced the original drive with the SSD, and it worked as expected.

Anyway, thanks to Sean for posting about the different enclosure! I was just about to go back to the free version of EaseUS...

Ok so I am also having this issue, and it's incredibly frustrating. I decided to try Macrium and tried doing the backup that way. Again wasn't able to, but was given additional information on the issue we might be having. I get an error pop up that says "Incompatible Disk Selected: The target disk has a incompatible sector size for this operation. Please choose a different disk. For more information visit: http://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50193.aspx"

So I visited that site and it says:

The error indicates that the target disk has a larger sector size than the source or you are using a USB disk enclosure that is changing the reported sector size of the disk. This is not supported.

The table below shows compatible disks for the source and target of restore and clone operations:
Source Sector Size------------ Target Sector Size
Compatibility:
512 or 512e------------ 512 or 512e (Yes)
512 or 512e------------ 4096 No
4096--------------------- 512 or 512e (Yes)
4096--------------------- 4096 (Yes)

I went to 'system information' --> 'storage' --> 'disks' to check the size of my target and source sectors and sure enough, my target was 4096, and my source is 512. I guarantee you that's the prob the rest of you are confronting. That link I provided gives info on ways to possibly solve.

Issue can now be closed

snipercatz wrote:

The error indicates that the target disk has a larger sector size than the source or you are using a USB disk enclosure that is changing t
I went to 'system information' --> 'storage' --> 'disks' to check the size of my target and source sectors and sure enough, my target was 4096, and my source is 512. I guarantee you that's the prob the rest of you are confronting. That link I provided gives info on ways to possibly solve.

Issue can now be closed

BINGO! Thanks Snipercatz!

When I checked my disk info I got the same result: Source 512, Target 4096.

So I looked around my desk and found a Seagate Freeagent GoFlex sitting in a drawer. It is a straight USB connection with no power so I thought I'd cannibalize the case and see if that worked. As it turned out, the connector portion just snaps right off and fits perfectly onto the new SSD drive. Fired up Acronis True Image 2015, went to the Clone, and everything took off the way it should.

I'm curious if this is specific to the powered USB drive adapters, the SSD drive or the combination of the powered USB drive adapters + an SSD drive. I've used the Acronis clone tool in versions 2011, 2013, 2014 with the same USB adapter with no issues but it was always on a conventional SATA drive, not SSD.

I had to get a refund because of this issue. That was 2 years ago. I'm glad someone finally found the cause. If Acronis had told me this way back then, I would have stayed with the product. Seemed decent but restoring to a smaller drive was a deal breaker for me.

I had this problem while attempting to clone a 1TB Samsung SATA drive to a wiped (Diskpart's CLEAN command) 500GB Western Digital PATA drive using a bootable CD of Acronis TrueImage WD Edition 2015. The Samsung contained four partitions, one with a bootable installation of Windows 10, and the data was small enough to fit on the WD. The WD showed as greyed out. I used an older version of the program (Acronis TrueImage WD Edition 2012) and it did not grey out the drive, and successfully cloned to it. So this error probably has something to do with cloning to smaller drives, possibly across architectures and brands; is likely a bug due to lack of documentation or reasoning given by the program; and has nothing to do with cluster size, as the target drive in my case had previously been blanked. Therefore it can be concluded that it is not a feature, or anything "intelligent," and that the solution is to use a previous version of the program. On a side note, I don't know why consumers are paying for Acronis. Free, bootable CD copies of Acronis can be obtained by Seagate and Western Digital, and between the two will perform a clone to almost any consumer drive. Neither will work on Samsung or Hitachi drives, unless a Seagate or WD is also directly connected to the controller.

Hello Paul,

Thank you for your comment. Logical and physical sector size parameters mentioned above are drive`s characteristic that do not change no matter what partitions you create or delete on the drive. You can compare logical sector sizes of your disks in Microsoft System Information file, see https://kb.acronis.com/content/56634, section "Click here to learn how to check disk's sector size". If they differ, that must be the reason of WD disk being grayed out.

We are considering providing more information about grayed out disks in the user interface.

Regards,

Slava

I am having the same problem, but with a slightly different configuration.  I have been storing backups of my laptop on an external 5TB hd.  When I tried to restore the backup, the destination, which was a new drive on the laptop, larger than the original drive,  was greyed out and inaccessable to me.  Like Snipercatz and Webdon said, when I went to 'system information' --> 'storage' --> 'disks' to check the size of my target and source sectors my target was 4096, and my source is 512.

I am responsible for backuping my co=workers laptops and now I am worried that other backups I am storing on the drive won't work when we need them.  Can someone please confirm that for me?  And, if so, are there any other backup programs that have solved this problem? What is a feasible back up solution for routine use that circumvents this problem?

Thanks to all who have posted about this problem!

eaw mhr,

Are you just restoring backup data to a data drive or recovering an OS image? 

You could try restoring using the sector by sector method or if restoring an image rather than a backup file then wiping the target disk will solve the problem.

Thank you for your reply.  The target disk was  new and blank.  I am recovering an OS and the data on the drive.  I appreciate your help.

What actual Acronis product and build version etc are you using for this recovery?

If your target disk is 'new and blank' then you may need to take the option to "Add disk" within the Recovery steps.

Also, how are you attempting to do this Recovery - this should be done with the Acronis bootable Rescue Media rather than attempting this from within Windows?

Yes, I am doing this from a boot cd from Acronis TIUR 2013 ver 16.0.0.5551.

Add disk? Rather than Recover?

Thanks!

See the ATIH 2013 User Guide: What to do if True Image 2013 does not recognize your SSD which describes some of the options for is your disk is not shown by the rescue media.

Thanks for the link.  However, these are not SSD drives, but SATA drives.

The link wasn't just about SSD drives, but any drive that isn't being recognised and the options that are available.

An alternative method is to simply format the new SATA drive to have a single NTFS partition then see if the rescue media will offer it as a destination choice.

Ok, great! I will try that.  I really appreciate your help and this whole experience has been somewhat hairy, especially when I was thinking I might not be able to use the backups where the source and target sectors were different sizes.  Thanks much!

See KB document: 57982: Acronis True Image 2016: Restoring to a Drive with a Single Partition - this is not for the same 2013 product as you are using, but it also suggests (in step 4.) of using the option to Add new disk

OK, so after running into problems last weekend I decided I had best check and see if my bu's would work.  I have tried restoring to two different SATA drives and neither of them are recognized.  I tried the Add New Disk option, to no avail.  I even re-formatted in MS and it reads "heathy disk".  I am stumped again.  I fully admit that I am not a tech and do not fully understand the problem or the proposed solutions.  I need a set and forget soultion that will work when I need it to.  Am I expecting too much? Can Acronis, or any other back up solution, do this?

Thank you.

At this point, I think that the core issue with this restore problem is simply the age of the Acronis product that you are using here, i.e. your ATIH 2013 product - you said earlier that you have version 16.0.0.5551 which is not even the last build version of this product.  Build 6514 was the final build version for 2013 but even this is now over 4 years old and will have very limited support (in terms of device drivers) for more modern SSD drives.

I would strongly recommend downloading a 30-day Trial copy of the ATIH 2017 Standard version and giving this a try - you should be able to find this on the main Acronis.com home page - look for an option to Try the latest version, but do not select to try the Premium version as this is only available by subscription not as a perpetual license.  You will still need to create the Rescue Media for this new version but it has much better support for the latest hardware that you are likely to be using.

Do you know if this problem has been resolved in 2017 version?  I understand what you are saying, but keep in mind this a SATA drive I am trying to restore to, not an SSD, so I am not sure it is a hardware issue per se.

Thanks

To be completely honest, I am not clear what the actual problem here is other than that your SSD drive is not being recognised by the ATIH 2013 media, hence my suggestion of trying out the 2017 software / rescue media.  

Have you tried reverse cloning?

It is possible that if your PC is a brand name one it uses a non standard disk layout.

THave you tried placing the image drive in the laptop and the new disk in an external enclosure and then booting from the recovery media restore the image from the laptop to the new drive. If that works onviously swap the drives around afterwards.

I created an account just to update that I also had an issue with the destination drives grayed out.  I checked the sector sizes as snipercatz as mentioned but they were all 512.  As it appears, the main partition just required a chkdsk repair.