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New Drive not Recognized.

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I have a desktop computer with a port on the top to put a SSD drive for backup or cloning.  Windows 10 does not recognize the drive.  I then went into the BIOS to "enable External SATA port" and I also enabled "Staggered Spin-up" in an attempt to get Windows to recognize the drive.  Does anyone know if either of these 2 options should be enabled?  What happens if you enable "staggered spin-up"?

Still not recognized by Windows 10.  I then went to Windows 10 Disk Management and found I had to create some sort of boot management so I chose "Master Boot Record."  The next choice is whether or not to give it a Drive letter.  When I clone it, it will eventually be drive C, but you cannot have 2 C drives and if I give it another drive letter, I will not be able to hot swap it.  I stopped at this point and don't know if there are more choices. 

How do I set up this drive so I can use it as a clone later? 

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ADoslow,

Sounds like you just needed to initialize the new disk - not uncommon for brand new disks.  When you initialize it, you set the disk parition type (MBR or GPT), the format type (NTFS, FAT32, etc - NTFS is the standard for Windows disks) and you generally assign it a letter that it will show up as in Windows.  Think you've done all this.

That said, when you clone a disk, it makes an exact copy of the original content - exact.  However, after a clone, you should not leave both drives connected to the system since the bios will see them as the same drive.  You can, but it is not recommended - you could end up corrupting the bootloader of your main drive because the bios modifies it when it can't figure out which drive to use. ALSO - AND VERY IMPORTANT - don't start your clone from within Windows, use your offline recovery media to start the process.  When you start in Windows, the system just reboots anyway, then modifies the Windows bootloader and temporarily replaces it with Acronis.  If things don't boot correctly though, the process may not get reversed and you could end up with a non-bootable operating system.  This is easy to avoid by using the offline bootable recovery media to start the process, it's just as easy and it's a safer method.

If you do leave both drives installed anwyay and things work OK, one drive will always show up as C: and the other drive will always get a different letter.  However, if you swap the main drive with the clone, it will become C and the other drive will get the other letter.

A clone is a clone and should be left unplugged form the machine and only used as a fast replacement if the original drive fails or if you need to revert back to the point in time of the clone.  However, after cloning, I would remove the original drive, replace it with the clone and test to make sure it boots up.  If it does, you now it was a good clone, then you can put the original away and put the clone in a safe place until you need it, or the next time you want to run the clone to update the backup clone drive.

As you seem like you have limited hands on experience with Acronis, and/or disk management, I would suggest checking out some of these videos to get a better idea of how the clone and/or backup/restore process is designed to work.  

117004: Great Acronis "How-To" videos and other Acronis Resources

Thanks!  You're right!  No hands on experience yet.  I will assign it drive letter C and things should be fine so long as I pull the drive after cloning.

Just out of curosity however,  if I clone C drive, will it also clone the drive letter as well?  That is, suppose I assign it drive letter L, would cloning the drive convert it to a C drive? 

As long as you're already booted into the original drive - that one will be C and should remain C.  Don't change that - many applicaitons rely on and expect the OS drive to always be C: drive which is the default that Windows always uses. 

As for the second drive, it makes no difference what letter you set it as when the original OS is booted up.  This is only the letter that the original OS assigns to the other drive as a secondary disk and has no bearing on what letter will be assigned when it is booted up into Windows.

When you clone the original disk to the 2bd disk, and boot into the clone (2nd disk), likewise, it will always be C.  If you have both drives attached (which you shouldn't though), the other drive will always take on some other letter, and then if you boot into it, it will be C and theother will get another letter.  It goes back and forth depending on which drive youre actually booted into the OS from. 

Thank you for your help!  Disk now recognized by Windows.  Opened Acronis, when to Clone Drive and set C as source drive and J (new SSD) as destination.  Instructions went as expected.  It then asked to reboot to begin cloning the drive.   Clicked OK.   I saw Acronis Boot Loader.....  at the top of a black screen as if rebooting.  However, the screen is black.  Computer is on, but black screen.  I'm guessing this is not how it is supposed to work.  I would think there would be something showing how long the process will take.  Yet 20 minutes later, still a black screen.  I hope I didn't screw something up.  If this in fact is not normal procedure, how do I terminate the process without screwing up my C drive?

I think you missed my note from above:

ALSO - AND VERY IMPORTANT - don't start your clone from within Windows, use your offline recovery media to start the process.  When you start in Windows, the system just reboots anyway, then modifies the Windows bootloader and temporarily replaces it with Acronis.  If things don't boot correctly though, the process may not get reversed and you could end up with a non-bootable operating system.  This is easy to avoid by using the offline bootable recovery media to start the process, it's just as easy and it's a safer method.

It's possible the clone is working, but just not displaying on your screen, I'm not sure.  Do you see lights on the drives showing writes happening (most pc's have a hard drive indicator light, but not sure about yours or the top tray attachment either).  If it looks like like absolutely nothing is happeing, you will have to take the plunge and hard reset :(   I would power down hard with the physical button.  Then, BEFORE booting the OS, disconnect the top connected drive (just in case - again you don't want to boot the machine with two identical drives attached), then start the PC and hope all is well.  If it doesn't boot, you may have to run Windows recovery which should fix the bootloader if this did get corrupted as a result from starting the clone process in Windows, but Acronis not being able to load properly afterwards. 

If all is well, attache the 2nd drive again, format it for good measure, then start the clone using your offline bootable recovery media and not from within Windows this time.