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Want Clone hard but windows not installed

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I am going to clone my hard disk with another one. The new one hard have no windows on it. My question is do i need windows in order to clone ?

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Alex, welcome to these public User Forums.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

You do not need the target disk to have any OS or other data on it as it would all be wiped out by the clone action.

Also see the link in my signature for the difference between Backup and Clone.

It is not 100% clear to me what you wish to do.

If the existing drive that you want to clone has Windows installed on it, it can be cloned to an empty drive.

However before cloning make a disks and partitions backup of the existing drive in case something goes amiss. Rather than cloning I prefer to backup and restore to the new drive.

For the clone to work, the new hard disk must be attached to either a SATA port M.2 port; if it is attached by USB or Thunderbolt port, because of restrictions imposed by Microsoft it will not boot, as it will be considered a removable storage device.

Ian

Edit: Looks like Steve beat me to the punch on this one - yet again!

IanL-S wrote:
However before cloning make a disks and partitions backup of the existing drive in case something goes amiss. Rather than cloning I prefer to backup and restore to the new drive.

Sorry i am kinda new with this software. Can you tell me What's the benefit of cloning with this software and making partitions backup of existing drive ?

Alex . wrote:

Sorry i am kinda new with this software. Can you tell me What's the benefit of cloning with this software and making partitions backup of existing drive ?

Backup & Recovery is safer than Cloning because it does not need both the original and new drives to be connected together.  A Backup is stored on a third, backup drive, then recovered from that backup drive to the new drive, with the original drive removed and set aside, away from any harm, change or mistakes.

Cloning can work successfully provided great care is taken, especially that the correct source and target drives are selected, (even more important if multiple drives are installed).

Unfortunately, the forums show that users can get cloning wrong and the end result is often a system that can't boot from either drive!  An example was posted earlier today with a user angry about his system being trashed after clone went wrong for some reason (yet unknown)!

Steve Smith wrote:
Alex . wrote:

Sorry i am kinda new with this software. Can you tell me What's the benefit of cloning with this software and making partitions backup of existing drive ?

Backup & Recovery is safer than Cloning because it does not need both the original and new drives to be connected together.  A Backup is stored on a third, backup drive, then recovered from that backup drive to the new drive, with the original drive removed and set aside, away from any harm, change or mistakes.

Cloning can work successfully provided great care is taken, especially that the correct source and target drives are selected, (even more important if multiple drives are installed).

Unfortunately, the forums show that users can get cloning wrong and the end result is often a system that can't boot from either drive!  An example was posted earlier today with a user angry about his system being trashed after clone went wrong for some reason (yet unknown)!

Thank you for your guidelines. I rather make a backup than cloning

Alex, just one further important note that applies to both cloning and recovery, which is that the BIOS mode of the system OS must be observed when using the Acronis rescue media to boot from.

Run the command: msinfo32 in Windows to check the BIOS mode - this will show as either UEFI or else Legacy (or a disk drive make/model).

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 65539: Acronis True Image 2021: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

Steve Smith wrote:

Alex, just one further important note that applies to both cloning and recovery, which is that the BIOS mode of the system OS must be observed when using the Acronis rescue media to boot from.

Run the command: msinfo32 in Windows to check the BIOS mode - this will show as either UEFI or else Legacy (or a disk drive make/model).

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 65539: Acronis True Image 2021: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

I see thanks for the tips btw i checked and its Legacy