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Clone of C: never started after reboot - Now No Boot Disk Found

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I was cloning the internal C: drive to an external SSD drive using the Windows GUI.  The PC restarted and then the screen went black and i was never prompted to confirm and continue.  I power cycled the box, and tried the same thing again.  Only the second time when I powered it back up, I started to get boot disk not found errors.  I have worked on this 10 hours but can't resolve the issue.  Box is running Win 7 64 and the latest version of True Image.  

The Windows partition is in tact and I've subsequently backed up the data to the SSD just in cases.  I used the built in HP repair utilities, short of a factory reimage, without success.  It finds the Windows partition but isn't succesful.  I built and bootable USB Win 8 install to get command prompt and tried inumerable combinations of commands to repair the master boot record and the BCD.  

Help!!

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Richard, welcome to these user forums.

Unfortunately, this is one of the main reasons why starting a clone from within Windows is never to be recommended as the process changes the system bootloader in order to create a temporary Linux OS environment from which to boot the Acronis application.  All cloning has to be done outside of Windows when it involves the OS drive and should always be performed using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media.

Do you have a copy of the Windows 7 64-bit installation media or repair disc?  If so, you can try doing a Startup Repair using that.

As this is now essentially a recovery situation, you should try contacting Acronis Support directly and see if they can help you repair the bootloader.

It's an HP Envy, and I did a startup repair usin the built in HP recovery tools several times.  I kept getting messages suggesting some startup files may be missing.  There's gotta be a KB on how to succesfully remove Acronis' boot manager from a Win 7 box and repair the old boot manager.  And you're right, I can see the Acronis directlry on the EFI volume when I assign it a letter.  I even assigned a letter to the systemrecovery volume and copied the old BCD file into the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot folder.

It's an HP Envy, and I did a startup repair usin the built in HP recovery tools several times.  I kept getting messages suggesting some startup files may be missing.  There's gotta be a KB on how to succesfully remove Acronis' boot manager from a Win 7 box and repair the old boot manager.  And you're right, I can see the Acronis directlry on the EFI volume when I assign it a letter.  I even assigned a letter to the systemrecovery volume and copied the old BCD file into the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot folder.

Richard, as far as I know there is no KB document on how to repair / remove the Acronis boot entry in this situation, but if you follow the KB document: 56634: Acronis True Image 2016: Cloning Disks then this clearly states:

If you are going to do system disk cloning, we recommend that you do it using Acronis Bootable Media
Even when you start cloning in Windows, the computer will reboot into the Linux environment the same as when booting from the rescue media. Because of this, it is better to clone using rescue media

Although the KB document doesn't state this, it is also highly recommended to make an entire disk backup image before starting this type of operation to provide a fallback position in the event of problems.

I do not know how the HP recovery process works. Invariably they use a separate hidden partition on the internal HDD, and you can create recovery media on USB or CD/DVD.

If you have access to a Windows PC running the same version of Windows try creating recovery media with it and see if that will repair the problem. The only time I have not been able to successfully do this is when the internal SSD had physical errors which would not allow the system to boot. The really odd thing was that I used the ATI recovery CD to clone the disk and the cloned disk worked perfectly.

Ian

Thanks for all the help everyone.  Okay, I finally got this resolved so I thought I'd share since I didn't see this solution anywhere - and it was embarrassingly simple.

BACKGROUND

In my case, the clone actually never occurred.  Acronis reboots the PC so it can launch it's own boot loader when you use the Windows GUI to clone your C:\ (which is not recommend but I've used it often).  Upon reboot the PC froze and therefore never did anything.  So the orginal 2TB HDD was still internal and the SSD had nothign on it.  Following suggestions from dozens of posts to tweak my BIOS settings, repair the EFI volume (boot record and BCD) using bootrec, bcdedit and bcdboot commands, I had no success.  One important symptom was the command "bootrec /RebuildBCD" yielded an error message to the effect of "System disk could not be accessed".  Uh oh...

SOLUTION

After getting some tech support from Acronis, and making a separate backup of the data on the HDD, the solution was simply to power down, unplug all USB devices, crack open the case and unplug the HDD, then plug it back in (power and SATA cable).  That's it.  It quitely booted into Windows.  Yay!

So it had something to do with the BIOS not recognizing the drive properly even though I could access it by booting off a Windows 8 install USB, which is how I made the seperate backup of the data.  So after too many hours to admit, disconnecting and reconnecting the internal HDD resolved the issue (I'm sure I would have eventually gotten their on my own, maybe).

CLONE WARS VICTORY

At that point I installed both HDD and SSD internally, launched Acronis from bootable USB (rescue media) and performed the clone with no issues (shameless plug for best practices and taking time to thoughtfully plan rather than diving headfirst with eyelids partially shut).

I hope that helps someone.  

Thanks for all the help everyone.  Okay, I finally got this resolved so I thought I'd share since I didn't see this solution anywhere - and it was embarrassingly simple.

BACKGROUND

In my case, the clone actually never occurred.  Acronis reboots the PC so it can launch it's own boot loader when you use the Windows GUI to clone your C:\ (which is not recommend but I've used it often).  Upon reboot the PC froze and therefore never did anything.  So the orginal 2TB HDD was still internal and the SSD had nothign on it.  Following suggestions from dozens of posts to tweak my BIOS settings, repair the EFI volume (boot record and BCD) using bootrec, bcdedit and bcdboot commands, I had no success.  One important symptom was the command "bootrec /RebuildBCD" yielded an error message to the effect of "System disk could not be accessed".  Uh oh...

SOLUTION

After getting some tech support from Acronis, and making a separate backup of the data on the HDD, the solution was simply to power down, unplug all USB devices, crack open the case and unplug the HDD, then plug it back in (power and SATA cable).  That's it.  It quitely booted into Windows.  Yay!

So it had something to do with the BIOS not recognizing the drive properly even though I could access it by booting off a Windows 8 install USB, which is how I made the seperate backup of the data.  So after too many hours to admit, disconnecting and reconnecting the internal HDD resolved the issue (I'm sure I would have eventually gotten their on my own, maybe).

CLONE WARS VICTORY

At that point I installed both HDD and SSD internally, launched Acronis from bootable USB (rescue media) and performed the clone with no issues (shameless plug for best practices and taking time to thoughtfully plan rather than diving headfirst with eyelids partially shut).

I hope that helps someone.  

Richard, thank you for posting your solution to this problem - it is very interesting that simply disconnecting the hard drive and reconnecting it again would have this effect!

[Uninformed speculation follows] It may have something to do with the way the SATA controller works. On one of my systems there is a eSATA port, however if I use it I loose one of the internal ports. Unfortunately the system periodically thinks something is attached to the eSATA port when there is not and I loose one of my internal HDD.

Ian