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Dell Laptop won't find OS but allows me to search every drive.

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Acronis 2017 on a Dell 17R SE, 16gb ram 1 tb Hdd with partitions. New SSD.

Upgrade from windows 7 on HDD to windows 8.1 then to windows 10. I don't have any disks but I do have a dell recovery partion.

I have tried the Universal Restore thumbdrive several different ways.

The system boots up into Acronis fine but it then can't find an OS to load. It will allow me to search all the drives to load a driver etc. but it fails to find an OS and give me the OK button to continue.

At one point I tried to load every driver I found on my HDD and it still claims no OS found. And let me tell you it was not fun because every time I just would try to load everything in the INF repository half of them wouldn't be found and I struggled to find which one to remove from Acronis list of additional drivers to get me to the create recovery media stage. 

Perhaps I am looking for drivers in the wrong place?

I did a back up of the Main partition (600Mb) with only 366MB of data and restored it to the SSD several times.

Once completed either the SSD won't show up with a drive letter or I can't boot from it.

The best I ever got was doing a direct clone (not recommended as it will make your SSD die faster) and it would get almost into windows and start a forever blinky loop. Blue screen with date and time and just as the backgrouind would load it would flash blank and start with the blue screen again.

I even used Diskpart to create new partitions and make them active.

Any suggestions? The only thing I see in the help files is that maybe I don't have disk drivers loaded when I try the universal restore. But then why does it allow me to search those very same drives for the drivers.

Thanks, JC.

Waited a week to ask for help LOL...

 

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And I have invested in a WD Mybook to put the backups on and i have an external SATA drive dock as well.

Since I just restored the main C partion and the Dell recovery partion to the SSD and removed the HDD from the system I get an error that windows is damaged and needs the original boot disk to correct the problem. 

Put the HDD back in and all boots fine to the HDD but I still don't see the SSD in my file manager.

i do see the SSD in windows disk manager and it says it is a healthy partition. 

So still lost and going back to work.

any sugestions are welcome.

Thanks again JC

 

John, welcome to these user forums.

From what I have read in your posts above, you are essentially trying to migrate your Dell laptop from a 1TB to a new SSD (size not given) and are running Windows 10.

First, you do not need to use Universal Restore to do this migration - that is only needed when moving to different computer hardware such as a different laptop.

Next, your SSD must be of a sufficient size to allow all the required system partitions and OS partition to be contained on it.  There are hidden system partitions that are essential to allow Windows 10 to boot correctly, such as the System Reserved partition and any EFI bootload partition if present.

Please take a look at the following KB documents that address this type of migration:

56634: Acronis True Image: Cloning Disks

1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone

These both have video tutorials included.

Awesome I will do that tonight. 

The clone almost worked but it got stuck in a loop at the windows startup screen.

Thanks JC

John, one further piece of information, the Acronis bootable rescue media must be started in the same way as your Windows is started.  This can be either using BIOS / Legacy or using EFI (UEFI).  See webpage: Check if your PC uses UEFI or BIOS for help is checking what your laptop uses.

Could you walk us through what you've done so far?  Have you already taken a full disk image of the original hard drive and restored it to the new SSD?  I'm not sure why you're using Univesal Restore at this point as it is only necessary when you have restored an image to different hardware (motherboard) in most cases.  If you're just upgrading the hard drive in the same PC, UR should not be needed at all.  

Is the problem that the Acronis offline recovery media is not seeing the existing internal hard drive and/or the new SSD drive you want to restore the image too?  If that's the case, chances are:

1) The SATA mode in your bios is RAID. If so, do you have an actual RAID 0 or RAID 1 setup, or just a single drive? IF using a single drive, the work-a-round is simply to go into the bios, switch to AHCI (temporararily) and boot into the Acronis media (not universal restore) and take the image.  When you're done, go back into the bios and switch back to RAID before booting the OS (if you forget, you'll get a BSOD).

2) Alternatively, if using RAID mode or if you have an actual RAID 0 or 1 setup, then you need to use WinPE recovery media (the default is LInux based and uaually doesn't have RAID controller drivers for Windows).  If you have just one drive,using the AHCI work-a-round in #1 is probably the easiest.  If you have an actual RAID with multiple drives, WinPE is the only option.  You build WinPE in the Acronis media builder option of the application and select teh Windows 10 ADK to download.  Once downloaded and installed, Acronis will let you build WinPE media with it automatically.

HOWEVER, when it comes to RAID, you stll usually have to add additional RAID controller drivers into the WinPE (not using UR which injects drives into your restored OS). 

Steve, I am in UEFI mode and AHCI.

Bobbo, The SSD is half the size of the HDD but the HDD was broken into two main partitions. One for Windows 10 and one for Linux.

I was trying to avoid moving the Linux partition but if I have to I can resize it down to approx 10GB.

I have not tried using WinPE but I just downloaded the ADK so I will try that if the clone fails.

Probably I will have to clone and then delete the partition for Linux.

Trying that now.

JC

 

 

Oh and in response to, "Is the problem that the Acronis offline recovery media is not seeing the existing internal hard drive and/or the new SSD drive you want to restore the image too?" The problem is the recover media is stating no operating system found yet it can "see" all the drives and partitions to search for a driver. 

Perhaps I should have tried WindowsPE mode instead.

 

JC

Also correct me if its wrong, but I read that you shouldn't clone a HDD to a SSD that something in the way windows treats HDD will make the SSD fail faster (caching or something I am not sure).

This is the only reason why I stopped trying to use the clone tool.

JC

The problem is the recovery media is stating no operating system found yet it can "see" all the drives and partitions to search for a driver. 

Are you sure you're booting the correct recovery media?  This sounds like UR is still being used.  The Acronis True IMage recovery media (not UR), doesn't care if there is an OS or not.  There are also no options to add drivers in the recovery media itself.  You bascially just backup partitions or full disks and recover them in similar fashion.

This is what you should be seeing when you've booted into the Acronis recovery media: http://windowsten.info/filedata/fetch?id=3747&d=1441391806

Also correct me if its wrong, but I read that you shouldn't clone a HDD to a SSD that something in the way windows treats HDD will make the SSD fail faster (caching or something I am not sure).

Cloning between a HD and SSD is fine, as long as both disks support it (same sector size, neither is dynamic, etc) and the clone is allowed to proceed.  Many people believe that the cloning process and/or backup and restore process will skew the partition aligment which can cause unnecessary writes on the disk as it would esentially write to overlapping blocks if the offset was not correct.  By default, diskpart will shows an offset of 1024.  However, after a restore or clone, that may be something different (possibly an uneven number).  That value by itself means nothing though.  You need to calculage the offset based off of the first sector of the disk parition.  Using a SSD alignment calculator such as this one, will show if the alignmnet is correct or not (which it should be after a clone or recovery.)

We're also just learning that your 2nd parition is a second OS and Linux as well.  Acronis may only be able to backup backup Linux as sector-by-sector so that may be part of the problem when trying to go from a larger disk to a smaller one - I have not personally tried, but perhaps Steve Smith or one of the other MVP's can provide some more detail on that particular aspect.  

That additional entry in the bootloader could have also been part of the reason for the initial corruption of the bootloader change after the restore - I can only guess though.

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/125983#comment-391219

1.3.3 Supported file systems 
Acronis True Image for home users supports:  FAT16/32  NTFS  Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 * ReiserFS * Note: ReiserFS partitions and disks cannot be backed up to Acronis Cloud.  Linux SWAP * 

* The Ext2/Ext3/Ext4, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP file systems are supported only for disk or partition backup/recovery operations. You cannot use Acronis True Image for file-level operations with these file systems (file backup, recovery, search, as well as image mounting and file recovering from images). You also cannot perform backups to disks or partitions with these file systems. 

Here's a link to download the user manual:

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/

John, it has been a while since I did an image of my Linux system using Acronis but if I remember correctly, it tends to default to using sector-by-sector for the backup file so will create a backup file which is approximately the same size as the source drive less perhaps around 20% for compression.  This is because file-level operations are not supported for Linux file systems, so Acronis cannot just backup the sectors holding file and folder data.

Thanks for all your help people!...

Now the problem is small. I have to hold the F12 key and tell my Laptop to boot from the first HDD (SSD) or it automatically tries to repair the HDD (Second drive bay and listed as second HDD).

I can't get it to boot straight up on the SSD so I can use the HDD for storage.

 

What have I forgotten?

Do I need to delete some partion on the HDD?

 

Thanks again.

JC

 

Look for a Boot tab or selection in your machine bios.  In that menu look for Boot Priority, since you are booting UEFI make the Windows Boot Manager first in the boot priority order.  This will cause the UEFI firmware to look for the Windows boot manager which will direct the boot to the new drive.  When you do this temporarily dissconnect the HDD so that it will not interfere with the boot process.  Once booted successfully in this manner the HDD can then be reconnected and repurposed, after shutdown of the PC again of course.