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Dell Laptop now a BRICK

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After attempting to clone a working hard drive in my Dell laptop the process failed just after the reboot. I got an Acronis error that flashed on the screen. I tried rebooting so I could catch the details of the error. No reboot just a blank screen with a blinking cursor.

I tried rebooting with the target disk removed and still nothing.

I tried to get to the setup or bios config (F2) and no luck! It says its preparing to enter setup but then blank screen with blinking cursor.

My laptop is now a brick! It was working perfectly fine before Acronis clone.

Help!!!!!!!!!!

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It is sad to hear of your misfortune. I must say that your comments indicate that you did not follow the recommended procedures for cloning a laptop hard drive and more often than not the end result is what you have on your hands now.

You should be able to boot into the machine bios by resetting the bios which requires in most cases the removal of the CMOS battery. Consult your machine documentation or visit your manufacturer web site support pages for how to.

Did you create or do you have a factory rescue or restore disk by chance? If so you should be able to use it to recover your system once you can regain access to your machine bios.

You may wish to read all of the documentation sections in the link below in order to understand where you went wrong and the proper procedures for performing a clone of a system disk.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATIH2014/index.html#…

One additional comment is that you should never attempt a clone procedure without first performing a Disk Mode backup of your system disk and verifying that you can restore that backup image. These steps insure that you have a way to recover a system when things go wrong.

I'm sure you won't have "bricked" your Dell but you could have some work to do to recover it.

Once you use Acronis on a Dell, you loose the Dell factory restore options because I believe Acronis rewrites the boot code to one of its own.

You mentioned cloning a disk. Is the original source disk available and useable so that you can pop it back and try again ?

If you can borrow a Windows CD, Vista, W7, W8 (you don't need activate or update it), then you can reinstall Acronis to that if you have no bootable media and then recover from within Windows to any older backups. If your backups were missing boot info (if that was on another system partition) then a quick Windows repair from an install disk fixes the code in seconds.

Mooly - not sure what you mean by "Acronis rewrites the boot code to one of its own." Also, if you re-read JDF's post again you will find that his issue is that he can no longer boot from the original disk.

JDF - there was an earlier thread regarding a similar issue (https://forum.acronis.com/forum/67070), please remove the original disk and install the new disk. Then attempt to boot. Let us know the results.

Dell (for example) has a recovery partition on the HDD that is accessed via one of special extra keys on the keyboard or via Windows if the system is running. Install Acronis and that option becomes broken with the recovery partition becoming inaccessible and therefore unusable. Many have discovered this to their cost judging by the Dell forum.

Mooly wrote:
Dell (for example) has a recovery partition on the HDD that is accessed via one of special extra keys on the keyboard or via Windows if the system is running. Install Acronis and that option becomes broken with the recovery partition becoming inaccessible and therefore unusable. Many have discovered this to their cost judging by the Dell forum.

I have not found that to be true. However, I do not activate the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager, as it indeed must rewrite the boot record and, I believe, it is unnecessary anyway.

I can speak from personal experience that it does. In my case I wasn't to bothered because I always intended doing a clean Windows install, and this just forced my hand. I had installed TI2012 on a brand new Dell Vostro 3750, made a full disk image and then recovered it... no problems with Acronis. It was then I found the recovery options were dead and scanning the Dell forums revealed this wasn't an unknown issue to Acronis users. All part of the learning process.