Clone with ADD 11 Home
I've just cloned the C: drive in my HP tx2z Tablet (320 Gb) onto a USB Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Tb. When I tried to reboot from Barracuda, I get nothing. The disk is now "invisible" and I cannot get it to run on my other laptop (Toshiba Satellite, 250 GB) either (without original disks of course).
I recognize the error I made. I should've copied instead of cloning the drive. I don't even know if the disc took the clone since the screen went black during the cloning process and the pc shut down afterwards.
After the fact, can someone please direct me to how I can make the HD usable again?
Thanks in advance.
In a proper AS-IS and Signature Copy clone, the PC will shut down at the end of operations.
If you tried to clone from within the Win Environment the PC will reboot in a setup/recovery mode and then shut down after doing it's clone thing.
If you run a partition copy, it will not provide the basic boot configuration. You need to prepare the USB drive first with format commands in Win.
I don't use USB drives at all but I take it your BIOS supports booting from them. If it requires a special Win driver then it will not load at all. If your main drive is active when the boot drive is active there could be drive number issues.
This all being said, I have never using ADD11-216 successfully cloned a bootable identical SATA drive. If I used a bootable CD version everything would copy but it would not boot. I could get it to boot only by using a floppy boot (WinXP) to get the HD loaded. If I made a clone from within the Win environment, drive letters I assigned were not preserved.
I am working with Tech Support on this.
Thanks Ronald
I got so frustrated and ended up taking the unit to work where I hooked it up to a computer there. It showed up as a weird icon on the PC. So I decided to reformat it and wasted all that time to clone and to reformat... It's usable now. I'll follow up to see if Tech Support comes up with any solution to this and similar issues.
Thanks, again.
Well, I tried both copying a bootable partition and cloning a bootable partition in DD11 running from on a boot Linux USB drive with the same worthless results. I either just get a flashing cursor, or a "BOOTMGR missing" message. Lovely...
Now, for all those of you who are trying to copy/clone their boot partition from within Windows - You Are Wasting Your Time.
Ever since XP (and maybe even 98, I can't remember), you have had to run the copy/clone process on your boot partition prior to the OS loading if you expect to be able to actually boot from the new partition.
I just bought this software to do just that in Vista 64 and Win 7 64 because my moldy old Partition Magic 8 wouldn't handle large (>500GB) drives without issues and wouldn't really work in Vista 64 at all.
I can say that I think I wasted $50.
As far as I can tell, Acronis Disk Director 11 Home is a total farce.
You are correct in that you should always run cloning and partition/volume editing from a boot CD or DVD. This insures that any Windows or other multiple access schemes are not in force. In the case of Windows particularly in wanting to keep duplicate volume serial number and O/S IDs in place (an exact duplicate to preserve especially copy protection schemes) have both drives hot with Windows booting from either drive can cause some drive/volume assignment issues. In short, as with Partition Magic, Drive Works, Drive Copy, and other similar utilities, booting off a utilties disk is the only safe way.
This all being said, I did not have any problem with Acronis Migrate Easy or DD10.1 running in safe mode off their Linux boot CD. I anticipate Acronis will straighten this out.
In my case of cloning two identical SATA drives, DD11-216 did not correctly copy the MBRs according to response regarding diagnostic results sent to Acronis Tech Support.
As an update to this whole cloning/copying drives issue with DD11, I found that using a bootable USB (Linux w/PE by DD11) drive in either Vista 64 or Windows 7 64 just resulted in cloned drives that simply won't boot.
However, if i use a bootable CD (Linux w/PE) created by DD11, I was successful at creating "cloned" drives that would boot in both Vista 64 and Windows 7 64, using the "As Is" and not copying the NT signature. It was a simple process. I just had to create the boot media in the OS I was cloning.
Now for the rest of the story... In XP 32 SP3, using the same cloning method (bootable CD (Linux w/PE by DD11) created in XP), I cloned a 250GB drive to a 640GB drive using "As Is" and not copying the NT signature. It worked like a charm. I resized the partions to fill the 640GB (C=150GB, etc.) and checked it to make sure it still booted. It did and still does as I am using the XP computer to post this. Then I repeated the cloning process to an identical 640GB drive and the cloned drive simply will not boot. I get a line of ASCII code when I try to boot from the "cloned" drive (no other HD drive present). I tried then to just "copy" the boot partition. No luck. Same ASCII script. Game over.
In all the afore mentioned cases, I was careful to be sure Windows (all versions) never saw any two drives at the same time. Also, all cloning attempts (good and bad) were first made from smaller to larger drives "As Is", then all partitions were resized manually to fill the drive, then cloning was repeated on duplicate large drives. (ie: 250GB=>640GB (XP) / 640GB=>1TB (Win7 64)).
Anyway, my frustration continues to mount with this version of DD...and I don't have an earlier version to fall back on. My old PM8 fails on drives larger than 500GB, so it's of no value in this situation.
I am out of ideas and any valid suggestions are most welcomed!
Update 8/8/10: I tried cloning the 640GB drive in XP using "As Is" and Copying NT Signature... Same old ASCII trash pops up when I try to boot from the cloned drive.
Thank you guys, Bytes o' Stuff and Ronald, for your updates and follow ups. I just gave up on this ADD 11. I didn't want to waste a few hours to reach the same conclusions as have been mentioned in this and other posts. I'll give it a try another time. Right now I am having some issues with my tablet, which I wanted to clone before anything happened but I couldn't because of Acronis failure.
I could clone the Win 7 system disk to a USB disk (including NT-Signature), with the Linux-based ADD11 Boot CD (ADD11H).
When rebooting the original Win 7 - without the USB disk plugged in - the MBR obviously is destroyed.
Windows Start-Manager informs about:
Status 0xc000000e
The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.
How can I restore the MBR resp. the NT-Signature on the original Win 7?
Using a bootable USB drive can be more trouble than it's worth for reasons too complicated to explain here.
To solve your problem, create a Linux based / PE emulated boot CD using DD11 from within Windows 7.
If you boot from the CD just created, you can successfully clone a Windows 7 disk to another disk in the pre-OS environment. After the cloning is completed. remove one of the two drives from the system before any attempt to boot into Windows. Failure to do this will result in the cloned drive becoming unbootable, as Windows will assign a different drive letter than the cloning process did resulting in corrupt boot identifiers and rendering the disk unbootable.
Hope this helps.
I did already proceed as you explained, with the Linux based PE CD. Trying to boot from the clone disk - for verification purpose - did destroy the boot record on the original disk, leaving the original system unbootable.
It's easy however to restore the boot record with a tool named bootrec. I wonder that Acronis does not note this tool in the manuals - at least I did not find this note.