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Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office cloning workstation from a Microsoft domain

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Hello, 

I have a PC that is currently a member of a Microsoft 2019 domain and I would like to clone it to a new SSD drive. Can Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office do this without issue? If it cannot, what do you recommend that can do the job? I haven't attempted this in quite a long time. I recall years ago that when using Norton's Ghost we would have to alter the SID to make the PC work again on the Microsoft domain. 

Thank you in advance for any advice, solutions, suggestions. 

 

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Things have moved on since the days of Norton Ghost; hopefully it should work without such issue using ACPHO. From you signature I see that the OS is Windows 7; ACPHO only (officially) supports Windows 7.1 or later.

The recommendation of experienced users is to use backup-and-restore rather than clone. Whatever you do, make sure you have a recent backup in case things go pear-shaped.

The only possible issue is if the Windows 7 is installed on a drive using MBR rather than GPT, as ACPHO has a propensity to convert MBR to GPT which can cause issues with Windows 7.1; to boot from GPT disk (as I understand it) bios mode needs to be set to UEFI rather than Legacy.

So I suspect we need more information: is the PC using a boot disk with MBR or GPT; is it booting using UEFI or legacy? 

To avoid such issues I would convert to UEFI before attempting the clone. 

Ian

 

 

Thank you for your response. My signature is ancient. I need to alter it to my current status.

This is an old Lenovo (IBM) Thinkcentre 5100 (M78). Based on the photo of the outer shell, the Microsoft sticker, I believe (it's slightly blurry), says Windows 8 Pro. I will have to see it to know if Windows 8 Pro is actually the OS, or it was upgraded to Windows 10 Pro. 

As far as what boot disk (MBR/GPT) and legacy vs. UEFI: I will be checking this PC this week and will have concrete answers.

Confirmed. The PC contains Windows 10 Pro. Why is restoring from backup preferred over cloning via ACPHO?

supercell29 wrote:

Confirmed. The PC contains Windows 10 Pro. Why is restoring from backup preferred over cloning via ACPHO?

The main reasons are because a full backup is always recommended before embarking on using cloning, and because it is inherently safer than cloning.

With Backup & Recovery, the original source disk can be safely removed and stored offline away from any chance of mistake, corruption etc.

Unfortunately we have seen too many occasions where users coming to the forums have gone straight into cloning and ended up with an unbootable system, sometimes because of a simple mistake in choosing the correct source drive, other times because an issue has arisen which has resulted in both drives being corrupted for some unknown reason.

Using Backup & Recovery requires that the system is booted from Acronis rescue media to perform the Recovery and this further requires that the same BIOS boot mode is used for the media as used by the OS, i.e. both using Legacy or both using UEFI.  This is because Acronis will migrate the disk to match the BIOS boot mode during recovery.

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 69472: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: how to create bootable media

KB 69427: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

See the following KB documents ref cloning.

KB 61878: Acronis True Image: Disk clone is not visible in Windows Explorer

KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk

KB 61665: Acronis True Image 2019, 2020 and 2021: Active Cloning in Windows

Thank you for all your insights! I will go the backup/recovery route. 

My initial question in this thread was: "I have a PC that is currently a member of a Microsoft 2019 domain and I would like to clone it to a new SSD drive. Can Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office do this without issue?"

I really need to know: if when backed up and recovered, will a domain PC (Windows 10 Pro) still work on the same Microsoft domain? (Server Standard 2019 is the Domain Controller).

Thank you for all you information so far!! Very impressed and grateful!

I cannot see why there would be any problem; being member of a domain does not, as far as I am aware, do anything to the disk structure. @Steve Smith probably is in a better position to answer the question as I have no recent experience of working with domain.

Ian

Any recovery to a new SSD should preserve all the user configuration exactly as it was on the original drive, including all domain credentials etc.