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Cannot reboot system after cloning it (initial boot works)

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Dear community

I am new here and a bit desperate, having spent hours in various forums (including this one) and help sections on the topic without finding a solution.

I have purchased an SSD (Crucial MX300) which came with a product key for Acronis (one of the reasons I chose to buy that SSD). I have cloned HDD's to SSD's in the past with Acronis and never had any issues.

So far, I had always used the Kingston upgrade bundles. This time, I just used the Kingston "adapter" to connect the Crucial SSD via USB to clone it, since the Crucial SSD did not come with such an adapter (looks like this: http://www.legitreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/kingston-uv400-b…). I did everything exactly the same way as I've always done with the other devices.

I successfully cloned the drive (GPT, UEFI, running Windows 8.1) using Acronis True Image 2015.

This time, however, the following happens;

Once the disk is cloned, I take the new SSD out of the USB-adapter and insert it into my laptop, after having removed the old HDD. I boot the system, all is well, the boot time has massively decreased and everything runs smoothly. However, as soon as I reboot the system (or turn it off completely and on again), the Windows logo shows up, saying something along the lines of "automatic repair is being prepared" (I just translated that; it's "Automatische Reparatur wird vorbereitet" in German). Then, it reboots the system and the same message shows up again and again in an infinite loop.

The error messages look like this: http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20161206/26c788ece84e03b214dfa40843d6c7… and then: http://img5.fotos-hochladen.net/uploads/20160104172110ba2j9zv8lg.jpg

At this point, I am left with no other option but to remove the SSD, insert the old HDD and start over. When I re-insert the old HDD, the system boots without any issues. I have tried it about 5 times now. I initially had a Supervisor password in "BIOS" (UEFI) and an HDD password. I have removed both and have retried to clone the disk. Same issue. I have initialised the SSD with GPT (as the original HDD is too) but have also once tried MBR, it made no difference. I have no clue as of what to do next.

Also, I have followed the recommendations on "how not to do things" by the very active user Steve Smith (many thanks, Steve!). I have no encryption and I did run CHKDSK before (do it by default ever since my first attempt to clone a disk with Acronis), no errors were found.

I really hope someone can help me out.

Cheers, Human

0 Users found this helpful

Human, welcome to these user forums.

One possible source of an issue is in the connection to permit the SSD to connect via USB - there have been reports in the forums where these have actually hidden differences in sector sizes.

I would recommend making a full disk & partitions backup image of your original HDD drive to an external USB drive, ensuring that you include all hidden / system partitions.

Next, power down, remove the HDD and replace this with the new SSD drive, then boot the computer using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media along with the external USB drive containing the backup, then restore that backup to the new SSD instead of doing the cloning.

Note: You should create and test the Acronis bootable Rescue media to ensure that it can see your current (original HDD) and the external USB drive you will be using.  You can also do the full backup using the same media if you want to do this completely outside of Windows (as would happen in a bare-metal recovery scenario).

One other consideration - it is important that when you are doing either the backup, recovery or cloning, that the system has been fully shutdown and that you are not in a hybrid sleep (aka hibernation) state.

Your response rate is amazing Steve. Thank you very much for taking your time to help me out.

I just have one more question for now, regarding this part of your message: "then boot the computer using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media along with the external USB drive containing the backup".

I did create the Acronis bootable Rescue Media on a blank USB stick (4GB capacity). Now I will set the boot order accordingly in BIOS / UEFI and give it a shot with both the HDD and then the SDD. EDIT: I was actually unable to boot from the USB Stick, I've tried all three USB inputs of the laptop; it was not recognised in UEFI. Tried it with a good old-fashioned CD-Rom, that worked and Acronis also recognised a USB Stick that I plugged in (just to see if it is recognised).

Question: Is the external USB drive containing the backup allowed to contain other files as well or will I need to get hold of a fully formatted drive with no other data on it?

Human wrote:
 Question: Is the external USB drive containing the backup allowed to contain other files as well or will I need to get hold of a fully formatted drive with no other data on it?

The external USB drive can have multiple different backup images on it or any other data - it is simply the place where you can point the Acronis recovery application to look for the .TIB image file that you are wanting to restore / recover.

Hi Steve

I successfully created a backup the way you've described it. It asked me, if I wanted to do a "sector-for-sector backup". The size of the backup would then be as large as the full capacity of the HDD (around 700GB), so it would also create a backup of the unused space. I didn't chose this option, because while I would have 700GB on the external USB drive, my new SSD only has 500GB, so I was assuming that it would not work.

I chose to use no compression, because the HDD only contains 250GB of data and I had enough space on the external USB drive.

Then, I removed the HDD and placed the SSD into the Laptop. I ran the Acronis bootable Rescue Media, chose the backup to be recovered and let it run. After approximately half an hour, it tells me that the backup was corrupted, but that I could still try and retrieve data from it.

I found this site: https://kb.acronis.com/content/1517

...and will now follow this: https://kb.acronis.com/sites/default/files/content/2005/12/1517/png_1.h…

Do you have any other ideas maybe?

Human, if you are seeing messages about corruption, then you need to run a CHKDSK /R against the source HDD drive to ensure that any errors are resolved then make a new backup.

Sector-by-sector should not be needed and would create a backup far too large to restore to your smaller SSD.

I would normally leave the default Acronis compression setting as it is.

Thanks Steve

Many thanks for your input. I just ran chkdsk again (/f /r) and will try to do the backup again, before trying the other steps (such as checking the memory modules). Will keep you posted.

Alright, good news: I managed to clone the harddrive and the SSD is now fully functional. Thank you very much for your help Steve!

Bad news: I wasted your time, the time of a friend of mine and my own because of a misunderstanding...

I had understood, that in the later Windows versions, chkdsk runs by right-clicking the C drive and running reparation under "Tools". I had done this in the past and it had worked. This time around, however, Windows immediately said "No errors were found", without even rebooting the system. I had (wrongly) assumed that Windows must have introduced a new, much faster way to detect errors. I was wrong...

I ran it through the cmd tool as admin and it did what it was supposed to do: it turned the system off, ran the check and then rebooted the system.

I am sorry to have wasted your time. It wasn't out of laziness, I had simply overestimated Windows... ;-)

Thank you very much for your help, Steve! Have a great weekend!

Cheers

Human

Human, thanks for the update / feedback - no need to apologise for any misunderstanding where Windows is concerned  - it can catch any of us out by the way things get changed over time.  Glad to hear all is well now.