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Cannot clone and target drive disappears

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Thanks for your help. Used Acronis for many years. Have Thermatake computer case with hot-swappable drive bay on top. Has always been my practice to put a disk drive in bay, then clone drive C (with Windows 7 Pro) for bootable insurance.

Bought ATI 2016 (local and cloud version) last night. First time I tried to clone (locally), menus seemed same as before. Computer rebooted as normal. Got screen showing it was writing data to tarbet drive. Then it failed (did not record exact message. Figured okay, shut it down then started fresh. Can no longer see drive i used as target in Explorer. It doesn't exist. So i tried again with a different drive. This time never got past the screen where Acronis is reading from the target drive. After half an hour figured it was not working and shut down, canceling operation. Now THAT drive is no longer visible.

Tried to open disk director, but now that funtion seems to have been taken over by Acronis and IT no longer sees the offending drive, so can't even re-initialize.

Please, anyone have ideas?

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Cloning of drives with different sectors may be problematic.  Some older spinning drives 2TB and smaller are 512KB.  Most SSD's and newer drives larger than 2TB are 4K sector size and cloning will fail on these.  Or, perhaps the hotswappable drive base is cutting out - maybe it needs to be reseated on the mobo - not sure, can only guess.

I've never used disk director.  I use mini tool parition wizard free which has been very useful.  Alternatively, if the drive is detected in the Bios, when you go into Windows, launch a command prompt by right clicking and "run as administrator".  Then run

Diskpart

list disk

Can you see the second disk now?  If so, note the disk # and use it in the next command which is assuming it is disk 2

select disk 2

Clean

After clean (if it worked) you can go into Windows Computer Managemenet >>> Disk Management and initialize the disk, format it as GPT or MBR, format it with an NTFS file system and should be back in business.

Speaking of... perhaps ensure that the new disk has been initialized and formatted the same as the original (GPT or MBR) ahead of time and then attempt to clone.  I would also recommend that you start the clone from your offline recovery media and never in Windows (this is a safety net to ensure your Windows bootloader is not modified in case the process somewhow fails to boot into Acronis).  Also, by using your bootable media to start the process, you can specfically select if you want to boot it in legacy mode or UEFI mode using your bios one-time boot menu.  You should try to boot it the same way as your OS is installed already - not always necessary, but just like how you boot a Windows installer disk determines the outcome of your Windows Install (legacy or UEFI), the same can apply with Acronis boot media too.

Last thing to check.. what version of ACronis bootable media are you using?  The most current is v6571 and I'd recommend using it (at least 6559 or newer though). 

Thank you SO much for the detailed and thoughtful post, Bobbo. I will try the steps you suggested and let you know the results. I just wanted to express my thanks quickly. Mike.