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Read-only SATA channel?

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On a motherboard (mine is an Asus P9X79 WS) is there a way to set up a SATA channel as read-only. I am interested in this because I want to do some cloning operation on my hard drive with Acronis software. I will use the bootable version outside of Windows. Other people in our office will all help with the procedure. Some are trying it for the first time. I think this will make the operation safe. If there is a better solution for this, I would love to hear about it. Thanks

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Chris, I have never heard of any option to setup a SATA controller or port to be read-only but this would have to be provided by your motherboard BIOS settings if it was available.

Please see forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this for some advice on doing cloning.

If you are doing this as a type of education exercise, then I would recommend obtaining a couple of spare hard drives then after ensuring that you have a full disk backup of your current, installed drive.  Remove that drive, replace with a spare drive then boot from the Acronis rescue media and restore the full disk backup to that spare drive.  Check that all is OK after doing this.

Next, do any cloning exercises using the installed spare (restored) drive as the source and the second spare drive as the target, knowing that your original drive is stored safely away somewhere well away from the computer and cannot be impacted by anything that is done!

Thanks Steve, I understand the workflow you suggest, and I would do that with Virtual Machines. I wish I could configure that stuff all day because I love it. No, we are not doing anything for education right now. We are cloning a lot of Desktops. I think I have lucked into something that can work for us... tell me what you think? Our workstations are set up with one OS drive (PCIex) and one data drive (SATA). It seems like Acronis True Image will not allow you write to the drive where the backup file was chosen from. Is that correct? For example if we choose "D:\Backup\ABR Images\P9X79WS-W10\P9X79WS-04_full_b1_s1_v1.tib" Than drive "D:\" is not a candidate to restore. Is my thinking correct. If so this will work well for now.

I see your MVP logo on your profile. Thanks so much for the tool that allows the creation of a Win PE based boot media with drivers. That is so helpful. Super!

 

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Chris, you cannot restore a backup image back to the drive where the image is stored as the first action of restore would be to wipe the drive in preparation, assuming this is a disk & partitions restore.

From your folder / file path, are you using Acronis Backup here or are you using Acronis True Image (2018) ?

Glad that the MVP Custom WinPE boot media is working for you - the latest version was updated to 14.2 a couple of weeks ago and now includes an option to build using the WinRE (Recovery Environment) for those who want to avoid downloading / installing 3-5GB of Windows ADK data.