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Acronis TIH 2018 Installation Disc Does Not Work But Acronis Rescue Discs Do Work

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What's the problem with the 2018 Acronis TIH Installation Disc? It doesn't work, even though I've tried it a dozen times. The Rescue CD and Rescue DVD I made will work fine but the installation disc will not. I'm using a Dell XPS-17 L702X laptop running Windows 10 Pro x64.

I'm replacing my factory installed 500GB internal primary OS drive with a 1TB drive. I'm cloning the old 500GB drive onto the new 1TB drive. I have the 1TB target replacement drive installed in the laptop and the original 500GB source drive in a docking station, which is necessary because Acronis cannot clone a laptop drive if the source drive is in the laptop, although Macrium Reflect is able to do so. The Acronis TIH 2018 installation disc will do nothing. It doesn't matter how many times I restart and hit F12 and select the boot from DVD drive option. The only thing that happens is the laptop tries to boot into Windows and I get the message "No operating system found". However, when I use the Acronis Rescue CD or Acronis Rescue DVD I made from the 2018 Acronis TIH installation disc they both work fine. I have initiated the cloning process using the Acronis Rescue CD. Hopefully, it will work, considering that I've had problems with every edition of Acronis TIH I have bought, including this 2018 edition.

Why can't I clone a disc using the Acronis installation disc?

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Sichuan, it has been a very long time (many years) since I have even had an ATI Installation disc, as most of my install media has been downloaded via my Acronis account, or purchased from an online Acronis retailer such as Cleverbridge.

I suspect that the reason why your ATI 2018 Installation disc doesn't work as bootable rescue media is simply that it is not intended to be used in that way - it is exactly what it says, installation media.  You would need to raise a Support Case direct with Acronis to get a definitive answer unless someone else in the forum can tell you.

If you have ATI 2018 installed on your current 500GB drive, then you can use the new Live Clone feature of the application to clone to your new 1TB drive with this attached via your docking station.

For Live Clone to work, the new 1TB drive should not contain a Windows OS and should be formatted in a supported way, i.e. NTFS (as either MBR or GPT).  If needed, you may need to use the option to Add new disk within the application.

See KB 60870: Acronis True Image 2018: Active Cloning for more information.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

Hello Mr. Smith. Thank you for your reply. I appreciate it very much. I'm glad I just checked this thread because I did not receive a notification email than anyone had responded.

Actually, I've bought several editions of Acronis TI and I've always bought them from Cleverbridge, with the option of also purchasing the installation disc. In addition, I've always kept copies of the executable files on another drive so that I would have them in the event the installation disc was faulty and the time limit for downloading my Acronis products had expired. I usually purchase the installation discs of all software I purchase.  Some purchased downloads expire, saved executable files get corrupted or are lost on a bad drive, etc, etc, etc.)

The Acronis installation disc can in fact be used as bootable rescue media but then again, I always create rescue discs even though I have the installation discs. I create them on both CDs and DVDs because it's been my experience that at times a bootable CD will work but the bootable DVD will not work, and vice versa.

Unlike Macrium, Acronis TI 2018 requires that the target 1GB new drive be in the laptop during the cloning process. You can't clone a laptop drive if the targeted drive is in a docking station. The cloned drive will not be bootable if created in this manner. I discovered that the hard way and only after a lot of research.

My new 1TB drive was purchased new, without anything on it. I did a full format of it in my laptop using Computer Management. I formatted it NTFS using MBR. I had earlier replaced my secondary 500GB internal drive with the same 1TB model. Both of them are WD Black drives.

Not being able to use this as a bootable disc doesn't just prevent me from cloning. It prevents me from using it for any reason, period. An installation disc that will not boot is basically just a piece of plastic.

I have another problem that I'm going to discuss in a thread I'll create, one that concerns either backing up all 27 email accounts to my secondary internal drive or an external drive and then transferring them back to a freshly installed Office 365 on my new OS drive or determining whether or not I can use an Acronis full backup I have on other drives to backup ONLY the Outlook 2016 file. However, I'll first determine whether or not I can do an Acronis backup of ONLY Office 365 or Outlook 2016. Now that I have my cloned OS up and running I'm going to do a reset. I don't mind reinstalling most apps but I am not going to reinstall Microsoft Office 365. I have 27 email accounts on Outlook 2016, 25 of them Microsoft email accounts. It's a real pain to configure 27 email accounts and I would have to change the registry before doing so because Microsoft allows me no more than ten email accounts on their Exchange servers. I have to change the registry to allow all 27 on the same server system. This wasn't a problem until Microsoft changed their server system last year or the year before.

Thank you again for your time and assistance.

When you buy your Acronis True Image, you should then register your new serial number to your Acronis account on the main Acronis.com website.  Once you have done this, then you can download the latest version of the installation media at any time from your account, without any worry about the download link expiring or becoming invalid.  I am still able to download the installer for ATI 9.0 from my Acronis Account.

The Rescue Media that you create will normally always be more up to date (in terms of the version of the software) than any purchased installation media - this is important as there can be a number of important fixes included in new updates that are not present in the install media version.

The documented recommendation when doing cloning, as shown in the ATI 2018 User Guide, would be install the new larger drive in the laptop then clone to the new drive from the older drive, but this would then imply that you are doing the cloning from the Acronis Rescue media.

With ATI 2018, Live (or Active) Cloning can be done from Windows using the Microsoft VSS snapshot method to capture live data, and in this instance the original drive would need to be installed in order to boot into Windows, so the new drive would be connected as a secondary drive, either in a USB dock, on a spare SATA cable or using a USB adapter.  This does work and I have used it successfully.  The key point with doing any cloning is to not attempt to boot into Windows with both cloned drives connected.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

Thank you very much for your reply, Mr. Smith. I appreciate it very much.

"With ATI 2018, Live (or Active) Cloning can be done from Windows using the Microsoft VSS snapshot method to capture live data..."

I tried this method, unsuccessfully, for two days. I finally got to the point where there was only one minute of the cloning process left and it aborted. That is when I finally found the Acronis article telling me to place the new drive in the laptop and the old drive containing the OS in the docking station. The cloning process completed quickly and successfully with the new drive in the docking station.

To be truthful, I imagine the problem was on my end. I'm not the most astute computer user. I'm certain that you and others could have successfully cloned the new drive with the new drive in a docking station but my ignorance prevents me from doing so. That's why I requested assistance from people with the proper knowledge of the process.

Thank you again for your assistance.

 

The main thing is that you have been able to clone your drive successfully, so well done for keeping going when you hit problems!  Thank you for your feedback.