TI Western Edition KILLS Bootloader on full encrypted HDD (Truecrypt=
Well, I´m VERY angry with Acronis now.
Installed Win7 Ultimate on 500GB Western SATA HDD. Full encryption with Truecrypt.
Everything worked fine.
Now the BIG MISTAKE: Started Acronis to clone this encrypted system to the 2nd disc
(same vendor, same size).
What happens is this: disk clone job started, reboot required.
On reboot it´s all f*cked up -> error message saying: mbr 3 error.
Thank God the rescue disc can fix this situation.
But what´s happening here?
Hi Pat L,
Thanks for answering. Please understand I used ATI with XP several years (with TC discs in some variations) and never had any problem. I was a happy camper. So I would have to start cloning from the recocery CD. Well, if it´s working, would be fine by me.
But there is no way I will unplug the source disk every time I want to clone the hdd. SATA contacts are designed for a max of 50 times connecting. And since both hdds are internal, this is not the way to go.
Using a kind of software like that means you MUST be sure you can 100% rely on the product, day in day out. It simply has to do the job, no more, no less. At the moment I´m not too sure about that. I´ll try your suggestion anyway, thanks again!
Understood. Cloning should work as you tried. I am just repeating the usual recommendations when it comes to cloning. Try to clone and leave the disk in place, but from the CD.
When you do an operation in Windows and ATI has to reboot, it has to modify the MBR to be able to boot before Windows. I suppose something happened to your MBR during this operation (typical of MBR 3 error).
If you boot from the CD, there is no change to the disk.
The reverse cloning is more important in laptops because the geometry of the disks is often custom to the laptops brands/models.
The error isn't because of the MBR being changed. It happens because TI can't find the boot files to load. Since the reboot is started in Windows, TI can access the files required and setup the "link" to them. This link is broken when the reboot takes place because the encrypted data on the drive is seen as garbage instead of the desired files.
Now I understand the szenario a bit more, thank you guys. So unencrypted discs should not a problem.
I was wondering why TI destroyed the boot sector of the source disc, I thought TI does only read from the disc and then transfer data as is to the target disc. I did not understand why TI was writing to the source, but the explanation of MudCrab makes sense to me. So TI does in fact not know/check that there is a different than original bootloader.
As with WinXP, I have always cloned full encrypted discs and never had an issue with that.
Now that I have decrypted my disc (overnight) I will try to clone it as is. Hopefully everything goes ok.
SUCCESS !!
I´m happy again, since cloning my fully encrypted Win7 disc worked now well, booting from CD.
The only thing which was that in the menue TI asked for a migration option, and when i chose, that the new disc should be bootable, it showed a window saying there is not enough space... (sorry, I don´t remember exactly), but the menue went on, to the part where you can choose "partition as is", and then start the process.
Anyway, it works, so I´m not too much concerned about that. Checked both discs, everything is fine now.