Hard drive no longer recognized after creating clone
I cloned my hard drive onto an ssd. The ssd works if I plug it in by itself but the hard drive is no longer found/recognized (most of the time). Every now and then, the regular hard drive will show up. I tried connecting it through different cables but it has not fixed the issue. Any ideas on what I can do? I'm selling my old pc and I'd like to be able to include the hard drive
That is the issue though. The old hard drive won't boot unless I also plug in the SSD (even then, it rarely is detected). It's connected on a different SATA cable as well.
The old hard drive isn't visible so I'm not sure how to reformat it
Luis, sorry but you should not be trying to boot from the old drive if the SSD will boot correctly. Get yourself a USB to SATA connector, or drive dock or caddy to connect the old HDD to the computer then format it that way, or take it to another computer to connect it and format it.
I'm trying to boot from the old hard drive by itself but that isn't happening. That is my issue since I want to sell my old pc with the old hard drive without having to include my ssd. However, connecting both drives is the only way to sometimes get into my old hard drive.
I don't believe it is a connection issue. This only started happening when Acronis came along. I'll try to reformat it by connecting to another pc. That does seem to be my only option at this point. Is there a reason why the Acronis software would prevent my old hard drive from being recognized?
*I forgot to mention that the old hard drive always starts up and spins. Just not detected under Disk Management or Acronis True Image
Luis, when you are connecting just the old HDD are you connecting it to the exact same SATA controller port and cable as you use for the working SSD drive?
If the old HDD does not work when connected exactly in place of the SSD, then I would suggest cloning from your SSD to the HDD so that the latter is then identical to the working SSD.
Please see post: 128231: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this!!!
Luis, the idea is that when you try to boot a computer where 2 identical disks are connected (your old hard drive and the SSD), one of them gets assigned a new disk identificator by Windows operating system, in order to be able to distinguish between them, which makes one of them unbootable. This is "by design" and expected behavior. You should not attempt booting your hard disk, when the old SSD is still connected, and vice versa - do not boot the SSD while the hard disk is still plugged in.
In order to resolve the problem you need to 1) perform the cloning, but do not reboot when the cloning is complete, 2) when the cloning job finishes, physically disconnect the SSD disk, 3) reboot.
The problem in your case was that you swapped steps 2 and 3, rebooting before unplugging the SSD.
If the computer still does not boot, even after completing the three steps, you need to enter BIOS settings and make sure that the hard disk is the first boot device in the boot priority / boot order list.
Regards,
Slava