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Cloning error "unable to lock the dynamic disk".

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I installed ATI on my Windows 10 laptop and created a bootable thumb drive using the media builder. I inserted the thumb drive into my desktop computer and attempted to use it to clone the HDD in that computer to an SSD, but I keep getting the error "unable to lock the dynamic disk. Boot your computer from a Linux-based bootable media and try again". I'm able to boot to the thumb drive and load Acronis, and it sees both the source and destination drives, but I can't get past this error even if I use the "add disk" wizard and make sure the destination drive isn't using GPT partitioning.

I'm not sure if I made some error when creating the media, or if I'm using the thumb drive wrong, or if the thumb drive can only be used on my laptop, or if I'm missing something else.

Advice would be much appreciated.

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Kevin, welcome to these public User Forums.

What steps are you taking when you are booting from the USB Acronis rescue media?
Are you shutting down Windows then booting the USB media?
Or are you doing a Windows Restart then selecting to boot from the USB media?

It is possible if doing a shutdown that Windows is going into a hybrid sleep state due to having Windows Fast Start enabled, which would give this type of error.

To do a full shutdown (avoiding hybrid sleep) press & hold the Shift key when clicking on Shutdown.

If you have ATI 2018 rather than an OEM version of ATI provided with your new SSD then you could take advantage of Active Cloning to perform this action without using the boot media.
Note: you should always have a full Disk backup before any cloning action.

Thanks for the reply. I was doing a complete shutdown, so I did some testing and discovered a couple things. On my earlier attempts, I had disconnected my DVD drive so that I could have both source and destination drives connected using SATA cables in hopes of better transfer speeds and less chance of the destination drive not being recognized. As a test, I reconnected my DVD drive and inserted the Acronis install disk, and then connected my destination drive to a USB port using a USB-to-SATA adapter. Then I booted to the Acronis disk, launched ATI and then I was able to successfully clone the drive. So that seems to indicate that the computer itself and the source and destination drives were all compatible with cloning and seems to isolate the issue to the USB Universal restore media. I tested it on a few different computers and discovered that I always get the "can't lock dynamic disk" error if I use the USB drive, but I'm successful in cloning if I use the Acronis DVD. 

The only two forum articles I've located that are similar to my symptoms indicate that either the USB drive may be in trial mode, or that the source and destinations disks may be incompatible, with one being basic and the other being GPT. I've ruled out incompatible drives, since it works fine by using the Acronis install disk, but I can't say for certain if the USB universal restore media may be in trial mode. I'm not sure how to check that.

Also, in launching Acronis from the USB drive, I had booted to UEFI mode, if that makes any difference. I'm not certain if launching in legacy mode would have made any difference? Just throwing out ideas.

I'd like to generate a USB drive that could be used for cloning, but the one I have doesn't seem to work. Some computers I work on do not have a DVD drive, so it's not always an option for me to boot to the DVD in order to clone drives, and I failed when trying to clone the install DVD to a USB drive.

Any advice on this matter would be appreciated.

Kevin, glad that you look to have made some progress on this issue.

With regard to using USB sticks for the Acronis Rescue media, then you only need a small USB stick, 2GB is fine but should be no larger than 32GB maximum, and needs to be formatted as FAT32.

I personally haven't used a CD or DVD for the rescue media in several years so know that USB media works fine for me.

The boot mode is important and should always match how your Windows OS uses - you can run the msinfo32 command in Windows to check this - look at the BIOS mode value and use the same for the boot media.