Toublesome boot into Windows 10 After Performing Clone Backup
Weekly, I back up my laptop by cloning my laptop’s entire healthy internal
hard drive to a healthy formatted external hard drive. I am not performing
a restore operation. My laptop’s internal hard drive is the source drive
for this cloning. My external drive is the target. I have re-formatted my
target hard drive before the cloning operation.
I clone with my Acronis Bootable Media, obtained by Acronis 2016. Before
the operation begins, I shut my laptop down and restart it to make sure my
internal hard drive’s IDE/Basic drive can reboot properly in the Windows 10
environment. After that I shut down the laptop. Then I connect by USB my
external formatted hard drive (which will be the target hard drive). I put
the Acronis Bootable Media in the CD drive.
Now, I press the on/off button of my laptop. I press F12 to modify the boot
sequence. I choose “boot up from CD drive”. The laptop then boots up to
Acronis 2016 using the Acronis Bootable Media. I choose “Acronis True Image
64Bit”. Once booted up into Acronis, I choose “Tools and Utilities” then
“Clone Disk”. I then choose “Automatic”. I then choose my laptop’s internal
hard drive as the source drive. I choose the USB/IDE external drive as my
target drive. I then click “Proceed”. The cloning of the entire laptop’s
internal hard disk to the formatted USB external drive begins. Several
hours later the cloning is successfully completed.
I click “OK”. Then I disconnect, and store, my USB/IDE External drive which was
the target. It now has all the data from the source drive. I do not close
the Acronis interface by using the red-X. (That caused problems with my
reboot.) Instead, I hold the “On/Off” switch on my laptop for 10 seconds.
This shuts the laptop down. I remove the Acronis Bootable Media. Once the
machine is off, I wait 30 seconds before re-starting. Everything is fine up
to this point.
But the re-boot from the laptop’s healthy internal hard drive doesn't go
well. (You will note that I performed a test boot using the laptop’s
internal hard drive before starting the Acronis activity.) It freezes on the
Windows logo for 2 minutes. (Usually the Windows logo displays for 2
seconds and then the reboot moves ahead.) Then on a black screen I get a
blinking cursor in the upper left corner for 2 minutes. This, also, is not
normal for a re-boot. Then I get a blank black screen for 2 minutes. Then I
get a "DOS" type error message: "Windows has encountered a problem
communicating with a device connected to your computer." Then it says
I have an unexpected I/O error regarding unplugging a removable storage device while in use and an error message 0x00000e9 FileL \Boot\BCD. One minute later, the laptop reboots itself and boots into windows 10 normally.
I want my laptop to boot up normally the first time with my healthy internal hard drive.
But if I do that, I'll never know if my clone was successful. I won't ever see the "Cloned Successfully" message box.
It's a trade off unfortunately. A clean shutdown and restart or the issue you have now.
I would say the product is deficient. It used to work with Windows 7 and 8. The least Acronis could do is let purchasers of Acronis True Image 16 know that it will not boot up Windows 10 correctly using a rescue disk after verifying a successful clone. A known issue.
I have never experienced this issue, but then...I never use the cloning process.
I have seen too many "clone" issues to feel safe and a backup/restore has to be "rock solid".
Over the years, I have stuck with partition backups and many tested restores before feeling safe.
Maybe one day I will feel confident enough in the clone process to do a test.
Robert, I was wondering about your comment concerning the "formatted" external Destination drive.
If you format the drive before each cloning, or if that one clone is your only backup, I would be very nervous that something could fail (i.e. Internal HDD) and leave you with only one restore possibility....
That is one of the reasons I have stuck with seperate named partition backups using the incremental method and seperate named data backups to an internal hot swap HDD that can be removed and placed on the shelf until the next backup or swapped out by rotating backup disks.
When things turn to poot, the volunteer MVP's here have been and continue to be a life saver.
We certainly appreciate their efforts and help.
Steve
Steve,
Thanks for you note. Cloning has been great for me. When a hard drive dies,
I go get another and restore it in a few hours.
Yes, I format my external before cloning. The cloning process will do this
anyway once I start the process. I have two external drives I alternate for
cloning. I format and use the older external. If something goes wrong, I
have the more recent clone.
I really appreciate the volunteers. I hope they can forward my suggestion
to Acronis, who should list this as a known issue.
Thanks all,
Bob
Bob,
I agree that the Recovery Media, having no user selectable way to shutdown the machine, is an issue. If such option were available your problem would not exist. Windows 10 plays a big role here as unlike Win 7 and 8, Win 10 handles hardware much differently. That fact contributes to your problem and is likely to be more to blame than the TI application. This is no excuse for the recovery media to not offer the user the ability to shutdown a session cleanly.
I have a suggestion for you however. Though this will not help with your issue it will make it known to Acronis that your issue exists. The installed application has a Feedback feature which you will find in the Help section (open book icon) on the left side of the GUI. Use that feature to report your displeasure and experience to the Acronis Development Team. That will insure that it is in fact a "known issue".
If you use the WinPE based rescue media instead of the default Linux based rescue media, you can type the following into the command prompt to shutdown the WinPE session.
wpeutil shutdown
Is this a UEFI computer? If it is then the NVRAM firmware entry created for the external disk during the clone operation could be the cause of the issue. Some UEFI motherboards include an option to delete unused firmware entries. Might be worth looking into.
It is not a UEFI laptop.
I'll think about a WinPE rescue media.
Thanks....
Here is something that I tried with the Linux based rescue media and my Windows 10 UEFI laptop. First I cloned my internal SSD to a HDD in a USB 3.0 enclosure. After the clone operation completed I used the following key combination to access the busybox terminal.
Ctrl+Alt+F2
Then I typed the following command to power down the laptop.
poweroff
After the laptop turned off completely, I removed the external HDD and the rescue media. Finally I powered on the laptop and Windows 10 booted normally.
I'm wondering if your problems are caused by Windows 10 new Quickstart feature. It causes all kinds of problems for power users and (IMHO) should be the first thing to be switched off when starting to use Windows 10. You will find the option greyed out in the energy settings, Power Switch behavior, or what to do when shut down (or similar, sorry, have German Windows). Click the upper Admin note in that window and you can switch it off.
Windows 10 supports hybrid standby mode in the same way as Windows 7, and that one is a perfect replacement, but without the crazy side effects that the new method causes.
Thank you folks,
Here's my outcome so far:
1. Making a WinPE disk is probably more difficult than I can handle. The Acronis instructions for making an Acronis/WinPE disk didn't work like the documentation said it would.
2. Ctl+Alt+F2 did not bring me the busy box terminal. Probably because my laptop is not a UEFI.
3. But disabling the Quickstart feature DID work. So, I could keep Quickstart on except when cloning.
4. Or I could leave Quickstart on all the time, what I was doing originally, and let my laptop boot up clumsily after each cloning. It eventually boots itself up after about 8 minutes, including an extra shutdown/restart. If you leave the error screens alone, it eventually boots itself up again into Windows 10.
3. But disabling the Quickstart feature DID work. So, I could keep Quickstart on except when cloning.
So the right thing to do (once again) is to disable this crazy marketing feature and use hybrid standby mode instead. It is quite easy to enable that. Go to the advanced settings of your current power plan. In the small dialog Energy Options click on the tree structure and set all the options of 'Energy Saving' as follows:
- Deactivate after - Never
- Allow hybrid standby mode - On
- Hibernation after - Never
(Someone please post the correct english names).
The latter is important as it defaults to 300 minutes or so and will screw up the whole thing!
With these settings every laptop and desktop can be shut down to Energy Saving mode, and therefore quickly be woken up. In case power is lost the computer will automatically boot the last state from the harddrive, because Windows saved the state as hibernation file as well.
This feature is available at least since Windows 7, has always worked perfectly (when set up as above), is as quick as the new Quickstart feature of W8 and 10, but doesn't cause problems, because when you (or programs like ATI) shut down the computer it will really be shut down - and not enter some mysterious half-baken state.
I think I had a similar problem. I used 2014 HD Clone Disk feature and after the cloning it would continue to want to boot into Acronis until I finally got the boot menu to come up. There should be better documentation for this. The product should check if you have the 'QuickStart' option enabled. Thanks to the contributers of the forum for this answer. On top of this problem - I got the short-key 2014 HD version from Crucial with my SSD...I already had 2014. I couldn't install the HD-Clone Disk feature without uninstalling the 2014 - not very convenient.