Skip to main content

Cloning with ATI 2016 causes boot failure with Windows 7

Thread needs solution

I use a Dell Latitude E5530 that runs Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.  It has a Kingston 1Tb SSD internally with the system partition (legacy boot) on it. I back it up by cloning weekly onto an external USB connected magnetic hard disk.  The procedure I use is as follows:

1/ Insert bootable ATI recovery DVD into the internal optical drive.

2/ Connect the destination drive for the clone to a USB3 connector on the laptop.

3/ Shut down Windows and restart the computer and as it boots, interrupt the boot sequence (F12) and tell it to boot from the optical drive.

4/ Start ATI 64 bit from the blue background menu.

5/ When ATI is up and running tell it to do an "automatic" clone from the internal SSD to the External drive.

I have done this procedure weekly for several years using ATI 2016 or previous versions and it has always worked properly until recently.

Three times recently my computer has failed to boot after the cloning process completed or after I aborted the cloning process because ATI was not showing me the expected screens as I was setting up the clone process. (It shows a screen asking me which restore method I want to use???)  Each time in order to recover the system I have had to boot it with the Windows 7 install disk and run the repair utility.  It seems as if ATI is either damaging the boot configuration data or messing up the boot manager.  Since I am running ATI from bootable optical media with Windows shut down I do not understand why it should be altering anything anywhere on the source disk.

Frankly, having had to repair the computer 3 time recently I am a bit unwilling to run ATI again as I can't trust it to not brick the computer.

I have searched around and found a few other people who have had similar problems but in that case they were starting ATI from within Windows and that will require ATI to modify the machine's boot sequence which can lead to a brick if it does not get restored properly.  That also happened to me once so I learned to boot ATI from the optical drive rather than from Windows.

Other than the problem with ATI bricking the computer it works normally in all other aspects.

Anybody got any ideas or need more information to come up with ideas on how to prevent ATI from bricking the computer?

Thanks...      Vince

0 Users found this helpful

Vince, welcome to these User Forums.

I can think of no reason why just doing a clone of your internal drive to an external drive using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media should have any impact on the ability of the internal drive to boot into Windows 7 <unless> you have accidentally restarted the computer with both drives connected after completing the clone, when you then have two 'identical' drives connected using the same disk signature?