Confusing cloning results
I have an Asrock Z87 Pro 4 mboard running an LSI SAS2 2008 Falcon with 4 SATA drives as a raid setup.
When I first obtained Acronis and started the cloning action from a USB WinPE Acronis installation, I ended up with a GPT boot setup on the RAID. I also lost all my sound drivers and could not re-install them. Windows kept notifying that the drivers were already installed.
On the chance that I had a faulty sector in one disk (very unlikely but maybe) I cut my raid disks down to 2 drives and reinstalled. The same thing happened where sound drivers did not appear.
I put the experiment on hold for some time and went back to it a few days ago.
I didn't use the actual disk I wanted to clone but a fresh Win8.1 on a single SATA disk as the master.
Using the original USB Win PE Acronis installation, I could not even get the latest clone image to boot at all from the RAID even though the cloning was reported as successful.
Then I went back to the original one I really wanted to clone.
Now I've ended up in a similar situation to when I first began this experiment but the raid set that the single master disk has been cloned to is not a GPT boot disk anymore. Disk Management in Windows 8.1 shows it as a standard Win 8.1 disk set with an initial System Reserved partition of 350Mb NTFS (System, Active, Primary Partition) and then the C: image of 683Gb which is everything from the non Raid single disk minus the sound drivers as usual.
I'm really confused by what has occurred.
Another issue is that in the first clone session, a windows boot manager appeared in my bios disk drive list at the start of motherboard booting. Now I'm missing that. All I see is the DVD drive and the LUN0 for the RAID set.
In the first cloning session, I could not boot off this LUN0 line. If I tried that I got a message to select a valid disk. Now if I do it, the bios simply ignores this fact and boots into windows.
So I assume somehow, the boot rom in the LSI controller board is taking over an invalid selection ?
All windows updates are current.


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In reply to Donald,… by truwrikodrorow…

Did you add drivers for your LSI disk controller to the WinPE media you are using? This would be necessary for the TI application to work with the controller correctly.
Yes, that was the reason I built the original usb Win PE boot media because I could not get the Acronis installation on my primary SATA HD to clone to the RAID set.
I just noticed that I did not mention that this time around, my current cloned working RAID Win8.1 installation was done from the newly re-installed Acronis on my primary SATA HD and it was booted in AHCI mode.
Is AHCI mode the same as Legacy mode that is referred to in Acronis documentation. I would think that in 2018 all standard Windows machines using SATA would be in AHCI mode when booting.
So go figure ! Why did it not work initially ?
It sounds now like it is possible that this second go around you booted the WinPE media in Legacy/CSM mode which would produce a standard bios boot on an MBR format disk.
You are correct that I booted in AHCI mode from the Acronis program on my SATA primary HD this time around. Again, from the Acronis literature, I understood that it is not possible to clone to a RAID set using a MBR on the RAID set. So, looks like I've misunderstood this ??
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