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Acronis 2016 restore fail - system will no longer reboot with original disk

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I have spent 3 frustrating days trying to get Acronis true image to work - with no success. I backed up the full drive image from my intel pc to transfer to a newer machine, (3 months old), equipped with Gigabyte motherboard GA-HM110 with 2 Tb hard disk, 8 gig ram, win 7 Pro. I checked the verify option for the backup, created backup of 89 gig.

Since I could not successfully transfer the image in earlier attempts, I had rebuillt my new PC system from scratch using win 7 disk, adding applications, I have quite a few I use regularly - it took about 14 hours to get the system fully loaded. Updated with the latest service pack from Microsoft and everything was working OK. I backed up the full image of the newly created system using Acronis 2016.  I then removed the hard disk from the machine and put a spare 2 Tb disk in its place, and then attempted to restore from the older PC (as an experiment) using the bootable disk created with Acronis 2016 -the operation completed successfully according to final screen, last step 4. Recovered MBR was OK, rebooted to "BOOTMGR is missing - press CTRL ALT DEL". 

With a long sigh, I remove the spare 2 TB disk and replace with the original disk I had removed (so as to avoid a further 14 hours of effort). Rebooted to exactly the same message !

It appears that the bios on the motherboard has been altered - I have to reboot using my WIn 7 disk, wiping out the last two days efforts - any comments, suggestions as to why the restore is failing ?

Is there some internal limit within Acronis that is preventing the restore ? Why would BIOS be altered ?

thanks for your help,

Russell

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The problem is most likely not Acronis or the ability to restore, but that your new system and old system are very different at the bios level and these settings need to match what your old OS build was configured to boot as.  Most new systems are GPT/UEFI configured by default.  You may also have to disable secure boot if it is enabled in the bios. 

1) When you push your image back, select the full disk, but uncheck the partition titled "MBR track 0".  This is partly why your system is reporting the bios has been altered.  Not because Acronis made a change, but the system you are trying to restore your image to, does not match what the OS was originally installed for. 

2) Your old system appears to be an older legacy/bios/csm build - if your  new system is UEFI, you need to go into the bios and ensure that legacy/bios/csm is enabled and/or supported.  Some bios let you seletc UEFI or BIOS, some let you select both but will ask you which should be primary.

3) I'm also going to assume your old system had the hard drive formatted as MBR and not GPT as well.  You want to make sure the disk that you are pushing your image to is also formatted as MBR and not GPT or whatever the old system hard drive was formatted as.

AS for the MBR errors you are getting on both disks now (the old image pushed to 2TB and the newly built system on the other 2TB drive), you can boot to teh Windows repair disk and attempt to repair the bootloader by doing the following (I'd try the regular startup repair first and see how it goes).  If it doesn't fix it on it's own, you can boot to command prompt from the disk and type the following commands in order:

https://neosmart.net/wiki/recovering-windows-bootloader/

bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force
bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd

 

Thanks for the quick response - it seems the problem was due to the external USB drive that was still connected to the PC, when the system rebooted it was looking for the boot record on this drive, not the SATA drive. I removed the external drive and both systems now boot.

So now I have the original (freshly composed) drive working and the image transferred from the older system - I really do appreciate your help since it kept me investigating the bios startup settings where I noticed the USB drive as the boot target.

thanks again,

Russell