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Cannot boot from either source disk or target disk after cloning failed to run

Thread needs solution

Details:

   - My computer is HP Envy 700-327C running Windows 7 (64bit)

   - It has 1 TB disk consisting of C: drive (~940GB) and D: drive (~16 GB) for recovery

   - The target is a brand-new WD black drive (2TB) 

I downloaded the latest Acronis True Image WD edition and started cloning.

The automatic method did not give what I wanted because:

  • the new C: drive was ~940GB, the same as the source
  • the new D: drive was ~940GB, too big. I wanted it to stay the same as the source

 So I chose the manual method and resized the new D: drive to 18G and the new C: drive to take the remaining.

After I clicked the "Proceed" button, the process began. After a few minutes, a dialog appeared to tell me to restart or cancel. I chose to restart. My previous experience is that after this action, Acronis will take care everything: restart, clone and display progress in a console (not Windows). But this time, nothing happened. The screen did not show anything.

After 8 hours or so, I did turn off the power then turned on. The source drive booted normally and my Windows 7 showed up.  I concluded that cloning failed.

I repeated the cloning process and nothing happened. If I recycled the power, the computer automatically booted up into Windows 7.

Finally, I changed the BIOS to disable all bootable devices except hard drives. Then I rebooted Windows and repeated the cloning process.  The cloning failed, the screen showed nothing after several hours.  So I recycled the power. But this time, my computer could not boot. The final message is:

           ERROR: No boot disk has been detected or the disk has failed

I tried to restore my BIOS to its original setting to allow for boot from all sources. Then I detached the target drive and rebooted: same error.  I then attached the target and detached the source and rebooted: same error.

Question:

1. Is my source drive really corrupted?

2. How do I get my source drive back? I don't have a backup.

Thank you very much for your help.

 

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Things can go wrong when cloning - see discussion and advice in this post.

Fortunately, it may merely be that the computer is looking at the wrong storage device. You should also remove the old system drive if you have not already done so. Then go into the BIOS/UEFI settings and make sure that the new drive is selected as the first boot device.

Hope this will solve your problem. Please keep us updated on your progrress.

Ian

PS Also some USB drives can cause issues if they are connected when you boot and have slected internal drive lower down in boot priority.

Hi Ian,

Thanks a lot for your advice. But I already did just that as reported in my original post. I removed the new target drive, leaving only the old drive connected, then changed the BIOS settings to boot from this old drive only (i.e., disabled all other devices such USB, network PXE, etc), but I always got this message:

         ERROR: No boot disk has been detected or the disk has failed

FYI, I have attached the original source drive to another Windows 7 computer and I can see all of its data there.  So I think the data is still intact but I don't know how to restore its bootability. 

Do you think Acronis might have done something to the source drive so that it is no longer bootable? 

If Acronis changed only a few files and saved the originals, perhaps I can restore them while the drive is attached to another Windows 7. But I need to know the names of these files. 

I am clearly loosing the plot .... I think I scrolled to the end of your post without noticing the introductory information. Too early in the morning here in Australia.

Hoc Ngo wrote:
Do you think Acronis might have done something to the source drive so that it is no longer bootable?

Yes that is possible. Have your tried Windows 7 recovery media. I assume you are running 7.1. If you have not created with Windows Recovery media, you can use the installation disk. I see you have another Windows 7 computer, you can use it to create recovery media. Hopefully it will find the Win 7 installation, and you will be able to repair it.

Ian

Thanks for your advice. I will create a Windows Recovery media from the other Windows 7 computer and use it to repair the corrupt one.

Hi Ian,

I would like to put a closure on this post after I fixed the cloning problem successfully. The process is as follows:

1. I created a Windows 7 Recovery media

2. I ran chkdsk.exe on C: to check and fix the file system. It turned out that my C: drive was corrupt.

3. After C: was fixed, I rebooted from the C: drive, ran Acronis, and selected the option to create a bootable media iso image in C:

4. Then I burned a DVD with the iso file just created.

5. Rebooted, setting the BIOS to boot specifically from the DVD (this was key to success; I should not have cloned while in Windows)

6. Acronis showed a menu with option to clone. I chose the option to clone the 1-TB source disk to the new 2-TB target disk

7. This time the cloning process ran to completion.

8. Shut down, removed the old drive and DVD, leaving the new drive intact

9. Rebooted, Windows 7 started successfully with the new C: drive.

So the key is as follows:

a) Always create an Acronis Bootable media, never clone directly while running Windows.

b) Reboot from the Acronis Bootable media and clone from there.

c) If the cloning process fails, should run chkdsk on the source disk (check individual partitions) to fix all errors before retrying.

That's it. Thanks a lot for your help.

Hoc Ngo - you nailed it with A and B

a) Always create an Acronis Bootable media, never clone directly while running Windows.

b) Reboot from the Acronis Bootable media and clone from there.

A can cause trouble because of variations in bios settings (secure boot enabled, disk is encrypted, using SATA mode as RAID which requires drivers not found in the default Linux media that Acronis boots into when started from Windows, certain bios firmware "weirdness", etc.)

Rescue media allows you to not only test that it can boot successfully, but also that it can see the source and destination drives so you can verify things first.  And, it doesn't mess with the Windows bootloader at all so risk of messing up the existing OS bootloader is pretty much non-existent.

Glad you got it all sorted out and working.  Thanks for posting your procedures for reference!