Turning a non-bootable Disc to bootable
I have never used Acronis before, so I am new to this software. I bought this software to make a clone of an external hard drive I made of home movies and photo albums I had stored on an external hard drive to play on a media player attached to my TV. The old external hard drive runs with the media player, the clone does not start. When I started the clone, I was given the choice of making a bootable media or Non-bootable media. I chose Non-bootable. I am assuming that I need to make it a bootable media on my cloned version. Can I change the cloned version to bootable somehow, or do I need to reformat the external hard drive and start over again?
Thanks. I will try that. How do you do the sector by sector?
I misspoke. It looks like cloning sector by sector is not available in TI 2016. You will need to image the drive using the sector by sector option and then restore the image to the new drive. This means you will need a storage destination for the image at least as big as the drive being imaged. Sector by sector copies all sectors on the drive, including unused space, into the image.
When you create the image and get to the Options, click on the Advanced tab and put a check mark in the sector by sector box.
EDIT:
EaseUS ToDo Backup Free has a sector by sector cloning option.
Allan,
What are the sizes of the disks involved in the clone?
What kind of media player are you using?
When you were given the choice to "make bootable or non-bootable media," did the screen look like the one in the attached screenshot?
If so choosing the non-bootable option converts the target disk to GPT which may not be compatible with your media player. For some bizarre reason Acronis insists on automatically creating a 100MB EFI partition if the GPT option is chosen. This extra partition might be causing an issue with the recognition of the disk.
Many media players only support USB HDDs up to 2TB. If your target disk is larger, that may also be an issue.
The Source and Destination devices are both Seagate 1 tb external hard drives. I am playing the source device through my TV with a Micca Speck media player. When I cloned the disc, I used the Acronis cloning tool and after choosing the source and target destination, I was asked to choose between "bootable" or or "non-bootable" and I chose "non-bootable" because I thought I was making an exact clone of the source disc which already played in my media player.
So I am assuming that if I do a Sector by Sector cloning, I will need to format my target disc and start from the beginning?
If you want try again with Acronis, you will need to select the option that says "Copy partitions without changes."
Given the nature of the disk your trying to clone, you will probably have a better chance of success following Mustang's recommendation of using EaseUS ToDo Backup Free that can perform a sector-by-sector clone.
Why cloning? The player supports standard files systems like FAT 32 and NTFS. Why can't you copy the files over from one disk to the other?
After the aborted clone, I would use a command line windows in Window and diskpart to "clean the disk", "convert to MBR", then Windows disk management (or diskpart) to create a new volume and format NTFS, then windows explorer to copy the files.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490893.aspx