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Clone "Successful", but Won't Boot

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I'm trying to clone a 1TB optical hard drive to a 2TB ssd, and even though the clone completed successfully, I can't get the cloned drive to boot. Instead, it seems to be booting off of one of the recovery partitions. I've tried going into the bios and trying to boot off of any partitions that show up as UEFI bootable, but none of them work.

Secure boot is off in the bios so that's not the issue.

I tried with both True Image 2018, and the latest version of True Image for Crucial.

The original drive is operating with the bios in UEFI mode as shown in the system information window.

For the cloning, I had the SSD in the external USB enclosure, and the original hard drive in the laptop. I saw a comment in the docs that said that the destination drive needs to be in the laptop, with the original drive in the enclosure. However, I can't boot off of the original drive when it is in the USB enclosure, so I assume to do this I would need to create bootable media.

I tried creating bootable media (WinPE) usb drive, and it creates successfully, but when I load up the computer and boot off of the bootable media usb drive (in UEFI mode as the docs suggest), it just sits there with the manufacturer's logo and the spinning dots below indefinitely (for sure I let it run for over an hour but nothing happened).

What do I need to do to get this clone to work successfully?

 

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Caleb, welcome to these public User Forums.

First, Microsoft prevents Windows from being booted from external drives.

Next, I would strongly recommend that you make a full Disk backup of the working HDD before attempting any further clone operations - this is your safety net in case of anything going awry.

It is impossible to say why your USB bootable rescue media won't boot to the Acronis recovery environment - this may be down to missing device drivers etc?

Is the new SSD a direct replacement for the original HDD, i.e. both using the same type of interface such as SATA or is the SSD of a different type such as a PCIe NVMe card drive?

What size of USB media are you using for the rescue media?  2GB is the minimum size and 32GB is the maximum.

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.

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

KB 69472: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: how to create bootable media

KB 60820: Acronis True Image 2018: how to create bootable media

They are both SATA interface. The USB drive is 8GB.

And yes, I've gone through that guide. It seems to me that Acronis True Image just doesn't work correctly with GPT partitioned disks. 

It occurs to me that the boot settings in UEFI/BIOS may have got scrambled. My recollection is that with a GPT drive you have to select Windows Boot Manger as the boot device, rather than a specific drive letter. So, check to make sure the boot drive is correctly specified.

Ian