Derek,

Can you remove the old HDD and then try to boot? 

Windows cannot handle 2 installed drives with the same disk signature.

I already did.

Regards,

Derek

Derek, when you clone a hard drive you must remove the source drive and install the cloned (target) drive in the exact same physical connection position as the source drive occupied.

This is why Acronis recommends doing cloning by installing the new (empty) drive into the normal boot position first, then attaching the original (source) drive in either another internal position or extenally by USB etc then cloning from the second drive to the new drive.

As advised above, you must remove the original source drive before booting Windows from the new cloned SSD drive to avoid problems caused by having duplicate disk signatures active.

See KB documents: 45831: Acronis Software: Unbootable System after Cloning Operation and 56634: Acronis True Image 2016: Cloning Disks that go into the details of cloning much deeper plus the issues that can be encountered.

Thanks for the advice on installing the drive in the same postion on the cable as the previous. I now no longer get the " A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" error.

Unfortunately I now get a new one: "PXE-E51: no DHCP or proxy DHCP offers were received. PXE-M0F Exiting Intel boot agent. Boot failure: System halted

Any advice on how to resolve this?

I just looked at the BIOS, and since having moved it to the other location on the cable, the drive no longer shows up at all. If I plug the other drive back in, it no longer shows up either. Things have just gone from bad to worse.

OK, that was a loose cable. Now with the new drive installed in the position of the old, I get the same "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." error.

Derek, the PXE error message simply indicates that the system didn't find any bootable device(s) and fell back on trying to boot from the Network ROM which is looking for a PXE Server on your network.

What is a little more worrying is that neither of your drives are being recognised in BIOS.  

What type of computer is this? I assume from the mention of having two positions on the drive cable that it is a desktop or tower type computer and not a laptop, as the latter wouldn't normally have drive cables and most laptops only support a single internal drive.

Please check that you have connected the drive cables correctly, i.e. if a SATA drive, that both cables are correctly plugged and pressed fully home at both ends (drive and motherboard).  If the older IDE drive again check both cables (power & data).

When in BIOS, try resetting BIOS to the default settings - make a note of any specific settings that you may have altered previously (use a digital camera if necessary).

Again, please ensure that you only have one boot drive connected at any time (either the cloned drive or the original boot drive).

Derek, please try reverting back to your original boot drive and check that you can still boot without issue, but with the second drive disconnected.  If you can then I would suggest redoing the clone in the recommended way advised by Acronis.

Shutdown.  
Remove the original boot drive and attach as a secondary drive (cable or USB).
Install the new drive in place of the original (same position and cable)
Boot from Acronis Rescue Media.
Verify that you can see both drives within the ATIH application panels.
Perform the clone from the original to the new drive.
Shutdown.
Disconnect / remove the original drive from the secondary connection position.
Enter BIOS and confirm that the new drive is recognised as the boot drive - adjust if needed.
Boot into Windows using the new drive.
 

I am now trying to create the bootable media. I have downloaded and installed Windows PE. There is a screen in the Acronis bootable media builder that I cannot get past. The only way I can get "next" to appear is if I select "linix based" instead of Windows PE. I'll assume that I should be using Windows PE, considering that this is a Windows machine. What do I need to do to get "next" to appear?

OK, starting over seems to have caused it to start working.

Derek, if you have the latest 6569 build version installed then the linux bootable media should be fine if this can see your drives when you boot from it.  The latest build has more comprehensive driver support for a wider range of disk drives.

When in the process should I cahnge the master/slave jumpers?

Derek, any jumpers should be set the same for both drives provided this doesn't cause an issue when both are connected. The new drive should be set in the same way that the original drive was set when ready to boot from it.

Note: I normally would set drives to use Cable Select, where this is available, which then removes the need to worry about master / slave, as the role is taken from the position on the cable itself.  This does not apply to SATA drives as these do not have such jumpers normally - these are found on IDE / PATA drives.

I have booted from the disc, have right clicked on the drive I want to clone, and the function "clone basic disk" is nowhere to be found. How do I proceed?

Derek, have you watched the video on how to clone?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlXkYKzY6vs

That shows all the steps that are needed, I don't see any mention about 'clone basic disk'.

I'm sorry. I'm in the wrong forum. I have Disk Director 12 instead of True Image.

I have purchased Acronis True Image 2016 and have followed the instructions in the video. Unfortunately the error I got after cloning with Migrate Easy and Disk Director 12 persists. I still get the  "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" error. Strangely, if I hook up a second drive that has the OS on it (with the jumper set to slave), the system boots. Having a second drive hooked up is neither practical nor desirable. What can I do to resolve this?

Derek, please can you confirm what disk drives are involved here please? 

Your reference to setting the jumper to slave suggests that one of your drives is an older IDE / PATA drive and as far as I am aware all the newer SSD drives are SATA drives which do not have any jumpers, so in that case you cannot simply replace one with the other as they use very different cables for the connections.

In this case, if we assume that you have successfully cloned the contents of the HDD to the SSD drive, then you would need to change settings in the BIOS to select the new SSD SATA drive as the boot device, as the BIOS will default in most cases to looking for the PATA IDE drive(s).

Derek, reading hits on Google for doing this type of change shows quite a lot of problems due to the change in disk controllers when going from IDE to SATA.  One hit does seem to offer a viable method of getting this working.

See web page http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1157913

In particular, the following advice:

Try plugging in both drives, booting to the PATA disk and using EasyBCD to get yourself into a functional dual-boot situation. If that works then you can boot into the SSD, install EasyBCD on that OS to get the bootloader into a single OS state on that drive, then shutdown, unplug the PATA, boot up and it should work.

This gave the responses:

Yeah, I pretty much have it pinned down to the BCD store and the boot device ID being different because of the drive controller changing. Which in turn causes the Windows bootloader to shit itself because it can't find the boot drive due to the drive cloning. I did install EasyBCD earlier tonight and am working through what hux is proposing.

Followed Hux's procedure, worked like a charm.

In some cases, using Universal Restore to generalize a systems drivers after switching the SATA mode will work.  Alternatively, if you can still pick the original SATA mode and boot into Windows, then you can try running the Windows tool in the link below to prepare the system, then  switch to SATA or RAID in the bios before booting again too.

Error message occurs after you change the SATA mode of the boot drive

I have a Startech IDE to SATA converter that is supposed to make the SATA appear as an IDE to the motherboard. This converter has the necessary jumper. What is strange is that if I enter the windows repair mode and execute the commands bootcfg /rebuild, fixboot and fixmbr, I the get the option of which installation to boot from on start up, and if I select the new drive it boots fine.  But as soon as I remove the other drive, I get the message "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

Derek, you have not yet told us which version of Windows is involved here?

If you have Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 or 10 then you also have a Boot Configuration Database that can reside in various different places depending on how Windows was installed.  In a default installation, Windows creates a hidden System Reserved partiton to store the BCD store, and within the store it holds the details of the drives & partitions that control how Windows is booted.

When you have both drives installed in your system the BCD data can still be found on the original hard drive, but when you remove that original drive, you remove the BCD and hence the system cannot boot.

This is the point of my post #19 above with the reference to the free EasyBCD utility - this can be used to move the BCD store from it's current location on the original drive to your new SSD drive.

You can also use EasyBCD to add a new entry for the OS on the SSD drive and use this to create a dual-boot selection so that you can test that the SSD OS can be booted successfully, then remove the original entry later when you disconnect the original drive.

The drives have XP Professional on them. I will try Easy BCD and report back.

Apparently Easy BCD will not work in  XP-only environments.

I also don't understand why I should need such a thing.  Migrate Easy, Disk Director 12, and Acronis True Image 2016 are all advertized as creating bootable clones.

Sorry Derek, I didn't know that this was a Windows XP system when I put forward the link to EasyBCD - this only applies to Vista or later as XP didn't have the concept of a Boot Configuration Database, hence the utility doesn't apply.

ATIH 2016 certainly can clone and create bootable media by this process.  The difficulty in this particular scenario is that you are cloning between dissimilar hardware, from an IDE drive to a SSD SATA drive, even though you are using an IDE to SATA adapter, there are still differences in the controller hardware and device drivers needed.

If you were doing a direct IDE drive to IDE drive then the clone process would work without issue.

According to Startech, the differences are accounted for on the adapter's board. If I were to do a fresh installation on the drive, the system would see it as an IDE drive. I don't see how or why this should be any different.

Clones are for the same, exact hardware.  You're trying to clone from IDE over to SATA now which is a bios hardware configuration change needed before the OS ever boots up (you now need to change the SATA mode to SATA, AHCI or RAID in the BIOS SATA mode instead of IDE).  

This would mean that you are not cloning to the exact same hardware anymore since your OS was installed with drivers for IDE and not for SATA, AHCI or RAID mode.  Switch the mode in the bios now and you'll find your OS won't boot.  Bascially, you're trying to do the same thing with a cloned drive which is the same as the original.  If it doesn't work on the orignial, it won't work on a clone.  Even if you used a physical hard drive dock cloner, this would still not produce a bootable drive in this situation since you are physically needing to switch the bios from IDE drive to SATA, AHCI or RAID now and a clone is just an exact copy of the original drive.  Again, if it doesn't work on the original drive, it's not going to work on cloned drive either.      

In this scenario, you have 2 options you can try:  1) Recommend that you try running the Windows utility I mentioned earlier, before cloning and before booting back into Windows.  Then clone the original drive to the SSD since the change wouldn't be applied yet, it would then get applied at the first boot using the SATA drive with the bios SATA mode now set as AHCI - JUST IN CASE - TO BE ON THE SAFE SIDE - TAKE A FULL DISK IMAGE "as is" before trying this as I have never tried going from IDE to SATA and the tool from Microsoft is for switching SATA modes (i.e. from RAID to AHCI or vice-versa)

Or, again, instead of that, you would need to run Universal Restore on the cloned drive so that you'd be able to boot with teh new SATA mode in the bios and then would need to run driver updates for all devices in Windows hardware manager once booted back into Windows.

Why should there be a SATA mode when the converter is supposed to cause the drive to be "seen" by the system as an IDE drive?

Derek, there is further information available from the EasyBCD website in their Guides section.

See the following which may help: 

Windows won’t start – Guide for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 - this uses their Easy Recovery Essentials for XP software to repair the cloned OS

Recovery Console: Guide for Windows XP - this uses the Windows XP Install CD

Installing XP as a second OS - in particular, see the section 'Setting up Dual-Boot' where you can still use EasyBCD to add the Windows XP installation on your SSD drive as the second OS using the Windows 7 Bootloader in the Master Boot Record.  

bootcfg – Guide for Windows XP - to repair the XP boot files from a command prompt.

Because you're banking on the converter working as it says it will, but there's no guarantee.  

It is still different/new hardware being added to the original configruation that did not exist prior to the clone image so you are not cloning from the same hardware to the same hardware - that's it, period.  

If you really want to test your theory, add another adapater to this adapter converting it back to IDE and plug in the original hard drive and see if it still boots.

Again, a clone is for THE EXACT SAME HARDWARE, not the same hardware plus a new adapter that makes a SATA drive appear to be an IDE drive that also didn't exist in the original system configuration.  

You need to use Universal Restore after the clone operation and reinstall drivers or try the Microsoft SATA driver patch before cloning and hope that works.