Cloning disk does not let me use USB destination
I am trying to clone my disks on my system. I have 2 1TB Drives in my system C: and D:.
The destination disk is the exact model and make and size of the source drive. When I Select Clone, select Drive C or D as source disk, the Drive G: which is a USB disk is grayed out. I have backed up to these disks before and now I can no longer use them as cloned disks.
The USB disk is exactly the same as the disk being cloned. Both are about a month old. The USB disk has been used before to clone and now I cant because it is grayed out.
I have deleted the USB Volume, re-formatted, ... to no avail.
I am very familiar with Cloning my drives. I can clone Drive C from the Acronis application in windows which reboots after all settings are set. I clone my 2 drives every week. The problem is one of the drives that was used as a clone is no longer able to be used as a clone. I have tried everything to make it usable as a clone drive. Is shows working and I can copy\delete\... to\from the drive. When It shows up on the list, it is greyed out as the destination disk. It is literally the same exact part number as the drive that I am trying to clone. Why is it greyed out? What would be the reason to Grey out a drive that is the same as the source? It did work many times before and now it is not working.
Most often a drive will be greyed out when ATI detects errors on the disk. Run chkdsk on this drive, if errors are found run chkdsk /r to repair the errors. You may also wish to use the drive manufacturers tools, if any exist, to scan the drive for possible errors or defects that chkdsk may not recognize and possibly use such utilities to repair if possible.
I revive this old thread because I am experiencing the exact same problem, my Toshiba USB3 destination drive is greyed out in the cloning menu whilst the same drive had been used successfully for cloning in the past with Acronis 2016 a number of times, last occurence was a few weeks ago with the same OS. I have Windows 10 with a NVidia card so the above ATI suggestion is not relevant for me and I cannot find any sulution anywhere on the forum, the search engine pointed me toi this thread, pity this thread was left unanswered.
I run checkdisk on the Toshiba USB drive and it is OK, I also reformatted, no joy.
Can anybody guide me please? Many thanks.
1) Disks will not be available for cloning if the source or destination is a hybrid drives or dynamic disk - this includes certain motherboards that have a built in SSD drive for caching (like 64Gb or smaller that is soldered on the board). Multiple drives in RAID are considered dynamic drives and won't clone.
2) If the disks have different sector sizes , cloning is not possible. This can be the case if going from a 512kb sector size (most spinning drives 2tb or smaller) to certain SSD's or spinning drives larger than 2TB which use 4K sector sizes.
3) If the destination drive is smaller than the source it may not be possible to clone - especially if the drive is smaller than the actual used content of the source drive. Keep in mind hidden paritions such as OEM recovery partitions that might be upwards of 20Gb in some instances.
4) bad sectors on source or destination - don't just run chkdsk, but run chkdsk /r /f on both disks first
5) although not always necessary, make sure both drives are formatted the same already - MBR or GPT
Many thanks for your help, it is appreciated.
Last Friday, my dealer installed a new Samsung 850 Evo SSD 1TB disk on my PC and he cloned my 500GB HDD (not with Acronis), and I kept my old HDD installed on the PC (reformatted) with the intention to use it as a cloning destination of my new SSD, thus always having one drive ready to use if one fails. However, Acronis would still not allow access to my old HDD, it is greyed out and cant be selected.
Reading your points above it may be because my destination drive (the old 500GB HDD) is smaller than my 1TB SSD although my data does not exceed 330GB including OEM, is this the case?
I also see your comment about the sector sizes and wonder if this can be a factor since the destination drive is now the old HDD, I am not too sure where to find this info...
Finally, if I make a complete system backup instead of a cloning, would that be useable in case of an SSD failure to restore my drive? These points are difficult for a non IT person to understand, my knowledge is too limited to grasp the differences between all options offered by Acronis. Forgive me for asking what will sound as dumb questions!
Thank you for your help.
Jean-Claude
Jean-Claude, a complete system backup is an equal alternative for doing cloning and has many advantages over doing a clone.
You can store your system backup in multiple different places, i.e. on your USB external drive, on a network drive or in the Cloud.
You can regularly update your system backup with incremental or differential or further full backup images and do this automatically via a scheduled task whereas cloning has to be done manually from outside of Windows.
Backup and Restore of backup images can also enable migration between drives with different sector sizes and using different partitioning schemes, i.e. moving from MBR to GPT.
Most importantly, for your question, you can restore your full system backup to your SSD or a replacement drive should you encounter a drive failure or other significant system issue such as malware infection etc.
This is a very helpful and clear answer to my question Steve, it does clarify what I had difficulty understanding initially. I will therefore work on the backup and schedule it, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Most grateful for your kind help and time.
With thanks and best regards,
Jean-Claude