Clone Disk
I am trying to clone a system drive from another PC to a new disk, I used the Clone Disk in tools, and it asks me to reboot. I even tried to backup the drive first and then recovering into the new drive, and it asks me to restart too.
Is there anyway to finish cloning without restarting the PC?
P.S. I am not active cloning the disk.


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Hi Steve.
Wiping clean the target drive did not trigger the restart, but at the end it gave me an error message.
Do you know how to fix this error?
By the way, I tried the target disk on the source PC, it did boot to windows, but it seems to be missing drivers.
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Charles, I would suspect that the error arises because the target drive for the clone was installed in an external adapter and this caused new hardware to be found.
This is why it is normally recommended to have the target drive installed in the location and system where it will be used as a boot device, and for which the correct device drivers are identified and applied.
The other factor here is that the message is being given by Acronis Universal Restore which is being invoked because of the hardware used.
The best way around these issues is to boot the original PC (where the new drive is to go) from the Acronis Rescue Media with the source drive connected externally to that PC and the new drive installed as the boot device, then clone with the rescue media from the external drive to the internal one.
Note: do not attempt to boot that PC with both drives connected after the clone finishes.
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Hi Charles,
I'm having a similar issue and I'm going to try some of the advice you've given here, but in the mean time if I may ask for clarification...
You've mentioned that having the drive(s) in an external device (mine are in a 2-device docking station) could cause different hardware to be detected and thus precipitate ATI to require a restart, yet I've cloned many system drives (HDD to SSD) this way and most have had no issues.
Are you able to shed any light on this, seeming, fickleness of ATI?
Both my tech PC and the source clone are MBR disks and the SSD I'm cloning the source onto is an uninitialized SSD.
I've created a Recovery Media USB drive, so I'm gonna give that a crack, but I thought I'd ask this as I'm really frustrated quite curious. =)
Cheers
--Nick
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Nick, welcome to these public User Forums.
ATI 2018 and later versions provide an option for doing an 'Active Clone' from within Windows to an external drive, but this is primarily intended to clone the active Windows drive using the same Microsoft VSS snapshot service that ATI uses to create backup images of the OS drive.
When you are cloning between 2 external drives, then ATI always has in mind that these drives may be used in the host PC being used to do the cloning, and so when it detects new hardware being used to provide access to the target drive, it will try to identify and install device drivers needed for that new hardware in order to allow it to boot correctly. It invokes some of the Acronis Universal Restore features in order to do the latter changes.
The user & MVP community have challenged Acronis on this behaviour but have not seen them make any changes as they consider the majority of ATI users will only want to use cloning to replace drives on their own systems, not be performing a technician role of working with drives from other systems on a 'work bench' computer used for this purpose.
Acronis do have business products such as Snap Deploy which are intended for mass cloning / deployment of drives to multiple computers.
When the Windows ATI clone operation requests a restart of Windows to continue, then this is not due to detecting new hardware connecting the drives, but because it detects OS files on the target drive. Starting with a clean target drive or using the 'Add new disk' tool to prepare the drive before cloning should avoid that restart reason.
Finally, ATI will follow the partition scheme from the host computer for how cloned drives will be prepared. So to ensure that your drives remain using MBR partitioning, the cloning must be done on a Legacy / MBR boot system, not on a UEFI boot one.
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