Acronis True Image 2014 Disk cloning of Windows 8.1 issues
I recently did a cloning of my girlfriend's Windows 8.1 system to migrate data to an SSD, and there are many issues that the computer is experiencing after completing the process.
Model of the computer HP pavilion 15 ab023cl
https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04683483
Model of the SSD Crucial MX100 512GB
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/storage-ssd-mx100
Originally once the symptoms started I thought that it could have had something to do with the partition type MBR vs GPT, but we went ahead and cloned the disk image a second time using the type from the source hard drive. That didn't fix the issues.
What happens is that the computer hangs upon trying to reboot or shut down the system. There is basic access to things like the task manager, or disk management that are now no longer funtional, Microsoft Word will no longer allow her to open up a new document upon startup, it will not allow her to save documents and gives a disk space error, the anti-virus cannot create a log, and basic internet use is slower that it is on her mobile phone. Certain licensed programs like Word and Excel cannot be used simultaneously.
None of these were issues before we tried to clone the contents of the hard drive, and seeing now that there are issues with program access am wondering if it has to do with the windows key license, or the registry somehow looking and recognizing a different hard-drive type and capacity than it otherwise had.
I've done a number of disk cloning procedures previously with True Image 2014, but this is the first time I've had this many problems. The cloning proceedure was done using the Acronis CD upon fresh boot and initiating the Acronis GUI before the OS started.
I did check to make sure the logical sector size matched up between the two hard drives, it did not allow us to use the disk management to check whether it was a basic or a dynamic disk as advised in the topic here: https://kb.acronis.com/content/44741
The process used was the same as this one here https://kb.acronis.com/content/2931 except it was a manual as opposed to an automatic cloning. The only difference was we did alter the size of one of the recovery disks since the first cloning process was giving recovery disk errors since there was only 8KB available on that partition.
Can anyone shed any light on this? It is to the point where it is not functional that we would put the old drive back in since this is a computer she uses for work.
I don't feel it is a hardware incompatibility because the computer does boot into Windows 8. The problems start after the OS has initiated.
Thanks in advance for any advice.


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Thank you for your response, Steve. I glanced through your how NOT to do this post late last night.
I guess what worries me now is what you stated about never booting into Windows with the original drive connected simultaneously with the clone. To validate the logical sector size it was connected via USB with the msinfo32.exe run to double check that the sector size wasn't the cause of the issue. I feel that the issues described with quirks running programs was happening prior to connected the original drive via USB.
I would love to try and do the backup method that you suggest for "cloning" the drive, but I am afraid I don't have access to a 3rd drive that could be used to store the Acronis backup file of the source drive.
Are there any methods or integrated tools with Windows you are familiar with that might held diagnose what the issue is with the computer?
I had her try to defragment and check the drive and for errors, but have not had her run the error check accessed via properties of the installed clone HDD via Windows Explorer. There was also some Action Center messages with a yellow banner I was going to see if we could resolve to fix the issues, but if you feel that is futile I'll just have her put the old drive back in.
I appreciate your feedback and how Acronis is paying you for running Customer Service via the forums. :)
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David,
"To validate the logical sector size it was connected via USB with the msinfo32.exe run to double check that the sector size wasn't the cause of the issue. "
Doing the above should not cause an issue provided you connect the original or cloned drive after Windows has booted and don't try booting with the two drives connected.
If you don't have a third drive for storing an Acronis backup on, does this mean that you are not making any backups? External backup drives are relatively inexpensive these days and a whole less cost than potentially losing all your data should you suffer a fatal disk error or encounter ransomware etc.
The only methods I can really recommend for where applications are not behaving as expected, would be to uninstall / reinstall these applications one by one then testing if the issues are resolved after each action.
I would not expect fragmentation to cause strange problems with particular applications - this tends to impact on performance rather than otherwise. Disk problems would have been reported during the clone process if encountered as this is more sensitive to such issues, more so than using backup & recovery.
I appreciate your feedback and how Acronis is paying you for running Customer Service via the forums. :)
All the MVP's are just users like yourself, who volunteer their time to help others in these forums - we do not work for or get paid by Acronis.
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We ended up putting the original drive back in the computer. At a future time I will attempt to replicate the drive using the back-up -> restore method you recommend. We didn't have access to a 3rd HDD of sufficient size to attempt the process via back-up -> restore at the moment..
I appreciate your support while trying to figure out why this didn't work. First time in many data migrations via clone that I wasn't able migrate data using Acronis.
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