Unable to Clone Windows 10 disk
I am running Acronis 2016 on a Windows 10 PC, the current system drive is almost full and I want to migrate to a larger drive. The current system drive is a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB and the drive I am trying to migrate to is a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB
I tried running the Aronis' cloning application from both the desktop and a bootable thumb drive and both result in a disks than cannot boot.
The cloning application itself indicates the clone was successful, but upon boot I get a black screen indicating there was a problem and windows cannot boot. After cloning, I shut down the machine, and disconnect the original system drive before attempting to reboot.
If I disconnect the new drive and go back to the original drive I get an error indicating that my BCD needs to be rebuilt. If I then boot my system from a Windows 10 DVD and launch the command line tool I am able to correct the issue with the BCD and get the system to boot normally.
BUT I cannot seem to resolve the booting issue I am having with the larger cloned drive? I've tried booting from the Windows 10 DVD, and attempting a system repair (which fails), I've also tried rebuilding the bcd, yet nothing results in a bootable disk. Using DISKPART I have checked to ensure the partition on the new drive is active, and it is.
What is going on? I've cloned Windows 7 machines with Acronis without a problem.
My system does have a EUFI Bios (ASUS P8P67 delux from 6 years ago), but it would appear the current system drive is using a partition style of MBR. I upgraded to Windows 10 last year from Windows 7.
My bootable Acronis thumb drive also has a prtition style of MBR.
The old system drive was disconnected after the clone operation had completed and before the machine was rebooted.
As well as not generating a bootable clone, why would the cloning software corrupt the boot system (BCD) of the drive being cloned from?
I've tried 3 times and each time the cloned drive fails to boot
Running Brit,
When you booted the recovery media, did it go into the Acronis Legacy MBR version or the UEFI one? If you saw colorful graphics (Blue background with white letters and a menu selection for Acronis products like Acronis 2016, Universal Restore, System Report, etc), that was Legacy mode. If you came to a menu with black background and whilte letters for your menu selection that was UEFI. You want to make sure to launch Aconis bootable media in the same method as the OS is installed to be sure that it clones in the same manner. Perhaps you already did, but just want to verify.
You mention you did remove the original drive BEFORE the system booted up - correct? Just double verifying since you need to do that since both drives will have the same hardware id after a clone and can bork up the bios interpretation of which drrive to boot into if two are exactly the same.
And was the clone drive in the same location (SATA port and connector) as the original as well at that time? This should be the case after cloning.
And you're saying that after the clone failed, you put the original drive back in (with the new cloned one already removed - again they shouldnt' be in at the same time when you boot until a successful windows boot has occured), but now your original OS drive is not booting either? Is that correct?
When I boot from the Acronis bootable media I first see a black screen with the blue Windows 10 logo. Once booted I get what amounts to be a Windows PE shell window and on top of that I get a blue Acronis window with white text and from this I assume it's the standard MBR version?
Before booting with the cloned drive, I am disconnecting the original system drive. and I pull the data cable from the original drive and put it into the cloned drive.
Once I saw the cloned drive was not booting, error message in white on a black screen, I attempted a system repair from a Windows 10 boot DVD, but that failed. I then opened a command prompt from the advanced recovery options and issued a BCDEDIT command. What this revealed was that the device information for both the bootmgr and default sections was set to unknown. At first I thought this might be the issue, and I corrected this using bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=C: and bcdedit /set {default} device partition=C: but the drive still failed to boot. I also checked C: drive to ensure the necesary files where present and they appeared to be. I've also tried a bootrec /rebuildbcd, but again this fails to resolve the booting issue.
After giving up on the clone, what I did was go launch DISKPART and clean the disk so I could start fresh. I then reinstalled the original system drive, back on it's original SATA port and connected the new cleaned drive to a spare SATA port.
Upon boot, I got an error message indicating that the bcd was corrupt and needed to be rebuilt. I rebooted the computer using the Windows 10 DVD and first tried a system repair but this reported it could not fix the issue but then I resorted to opening a command prompt.
Entering BCDEDIT from the command prompt revealed a BCD file with many more entries then there ever was and so I issued the command bootrec /rebuildbcd. After this command I ran bcdedit again and this time I only saw 2 entries, one for bootmgr and one for default, howeve, the device partitioin listed for the bootmgr didn't exist, it read E: when it should have been C:. After correcing the device information for bootmgr, I was able to boot the computer successfully.
I've cloned over to 50 Windows 7 machines with Acronis and never had a problem (upgrading from HD to SSD)
Yup, Windows 10 is a new beast and there are all kinds of people having trouble just booting to it from their bios - I myself was one after moving from a standard SSD to a PCIE NVME drive on a a new UEFI Z170X motherboard. A few of us just spent the better part of a week helping on guy with a similar board and drive and part of it was also his bios, the part ended up being bad media - both verbatim discs and a verbatim flash drive. Funny thing, is actually looks like it was all of the verbatim media that was bad (discs and drive!)
I've not experinced this issue, but I also don't clone. I have gotten into the habit of taking a full disk image and pushing the image back to the new drive as there is no way that it can modify the bootloader with this method. However, if you initiate a clone from within Windows, it does switch to the Acronis bootloader that is hidden on your drive and I suspect this is where the issues came about - although you did mention you're doing this with boot media, so maybe not.
Your media does appear to be WinPE. The easiest way to make sure you're booting into the proper mode is by using your one time boot/boot override button after rebooting and seletively picking legacy or UEFI (to match how the original OS was installed). Hopefully, in doing so, you will have better luck in the future with Win 10 and cloning. There are some limitations of cloning, compared to taking an image and restoring it as well (different sector size drives will result in failed clones, the need to remove the second disk, etc). That's the main reason why I choose to image and restore, but also because there seems to be a higher probablily of issues that could arise from cloning. Even the documenation recommends taking a full disk image before attemptig a clone.
http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/#21822.html
- Could you tell me how to clone: in Windows or after booting from the rescue media? Even when you start cloning in Windows, the computer will reboot into the Linux environment the same as when booting from the rescue media. Because of this, it is better to clone under rescue media. For example, there may be a case when your hard disk drives are detected in Windows and not detected in Linux. If this is the case, the cloning operation will fail after reboot. When booting from the rescue media, you can make sure that Acronis True Image 2016 detects both the source and target disks before starting the cloning operation.
- Can I clone or back up and recover a dual boot machine? Yes, this is possible in most cases. If your systems are installed in separate partitions of the same physical hard disk drive, cloning or recovery usually proceeds without any problems. If the systems are on different physical hard disk drives, there may be some problems with bootability after recovery.
http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/#3565.html
Disk cloning utility
The Clone disk utility allows you to clone your hard disk drive by copying the partitions to another hard disk.
Please read before you start:
- When you want to clone your system to a higher-capacity hard disk, we recommend that you install the target (new) drive where you plan to use it and the source drive in another location, e.g. in an external USB enclosure. This is especially important for laptops.
Warning! Your old and new hard drives must work in the same controller mode (for example, IDE or AHCI). Otherwise, your computer will not start from the new hard drive.
Warning! If you clone a disk with Windows to an external USB hard drive, you will not be able to boot from it. Windows does not support booting from external USB hard drives. Please clone to internal SSD or HDD instead.
- The Clone disk utility does not support multiboot systems.
- On program screens, damaged partitions are marked with a red circle and a white cross inside in the upper left corner. Before you start cloning, you should check such disks for errors and correct the errors using the appropriate operating system tools.
- We strongly recommend that you create a backup of the entire original disk as a safety precaution. It could be your data saver if something goes wrong with your original hard disk during cloning. For information on how to create such a backup see Backing up partitions and disks. After creating the backup, make sure that you validate it.
Brit,
In order for you to boot the boot media you must set your machine bios to boot from that media. You obviously did this to get as far as your description indicates. The question is did you make the right selection when choosing the boot media?
Because your bios is UEFI capable what appears in the boot device list is dependent on how your bios is configured. You should have several choices here. For example, you might be able set your boot to Legacy (CSM) only or, Legacy UEFI (Legacy first), UEFI only or UEFI Legacy (UEFI first). If you have your bios set to boot both Legacy and UEFI devices (as in Legacy UEFI (UEFI first) or UEFI Legacy (Legacy first) ), then you will see two choices for booting any removable media attached to your machine that are bootable. The choices should show the device by name such as Sandisk or UEFI Sandisk. As you might guess the UEFI Sandisk choice would boot the device in UEFI mode. So your choice here must be the correct one or your clone attempt will fail with a non bootable result.
For Windows 10 you will have the best success if you first connect the new disk to the same data cable that is connected to the existing disk Then attach the existing disk to another sata data cable. Do this prior to booting your machine to the boot media. When you setup the clone task check the option box to shutdown the computer after task completes and wait for the machine to shutdown after the clone task completes. At that point disconnect the original disk data cable and then start the machine. If you follow these procedures and boot the machine in the correct mode to the boot media your machine should boot to the new device when started.
After 3 failed clone attemps, I was able to get a working drive using the backup and restore method.
However even that didn't go smoothly, and bcd was again corrupted after the restore, and before the machine would boot I had to rebuild the bcd from the command line and then correct the device partition information for bootmgr, which was again set to a non existance device.
After all the fuss over the last couple of days, it's nice to have a working machine again :)
I encourage you to report your issues to Acronis support via the in app feedback option found in the help section of the application or using the link at the top of this page. Make reference or link to this Forum thread in that feedback. If you use the in app feedback you can send along with your feedback a system report which will give the Support team a much better idea of what your problems were.
You should not have to edit the bootloader to get a restored drive to work on your machine. Your issue is that of a recovery problem which carries an unlimited support clause so any support for recovery issues are free, no time limit.