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Default drive after Clone disk

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G'day all, after arm wrestling MS for a couple of weeks and losing, Acronis solved my problem in less that an hour from the time I went to Google.

I needed to clone my primary drive on a Windows 7 64-bit system. No problem for Acronis except that it then made the cloned drive the new primary. Into the BIOS and restored everything to its original order.

Is there any way to instruct Acronis to leave the original drive as the primary so that the cloned drive can remain on standby?

Thanks and cheers, Mac

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Windows will not allow two active partitions, two system drives, on one machine and if it finds more than one will mark one as not active/system. That will make that drive no longer bootable. Windows might even treat the active reserved partition on one hdisk as the current one and use the system partition of the other. Then things can get really wacky.

If you want to keep a clone take it off the machine before you boot up after the cloning process.

If you don't want to remove the second harddisk, then instead of cloning, make a diskmode backup of the source disk -- the advantage here is that you don't have to detach the drive afterwards, you can store multiple backups depending on disk size. Plus, if anything goes wrong when setting up the new drive, you can always go back and restore again. Plus there is no danger you might clone from the target to the source and thereby end up with nothing but blank hard disks. The disadvantage is you have to restore the backup to the new disk if you replace the original--you can't just swap hdisks and be up and running. Since the need to restore or swap disks happens much less rarely than one wants to backup, most folks think the benefits outweigh the costs.

Many thanks Scott for a very comprehensive answer. I will do exactly as you suggest. If the only task is to restore after a primary crash, that is not a hefty price to pay. My problems started when I created a system image of Windows 7 64-bit. When I attempted to restore the system image to the primary replacement I got this:

"Windows cannot restore a system image to a computer that has different firmware. The system image was created on a computer using EFI and this computer is using BIOS."

These are my hardware components and clearly there is a problem with the boot of the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 and Windows 7 64-bit. So the system image is saved with an EFI partition but it does not appear to be possible to boot the computer from the MB in UEFI mode unless the MB detects the correct disk in the DVD draw. The default is BIOS. I am working on a work around like snatching the EFI Disk from the draw and replacing with the image disk but no success yet.

Thanks again, Mac

Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5: EVGA GTX580; Intel Core i7 3960X; Corsair 16GB Kit (4x4GB);Intel 250GB SSD; 200w PSU: 1200w PSU: Corsair H100 Cooler: Win 7 64bit:
Performance. Processor 7.8: RAM: 7.9: Grapics 7.9: Gaming Graphics: 7.9 HDD 7.6.
MS Flight Simulator X

ATI 2012 supports UEFI. Consider:

http://kb.acronis.com/content/24018

and

http://kb.acronis.com/content/5684

Be sure that when you backup/restore, you get all the OS partitions, including the system Reserved partition, which contains the boot manager. I recommend doing a diskmode backup and restore.

Thanks, Scott, good reading. I have upgraded to Acronis True Image Home 2012 (Family Pack) so I think I have the problem covered now. Very happy, Mac