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Source drive wont boot after clone...data is still there

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Hello, I just finished installing everything I needed and made a clone onto another drive.  After it finished, the computer wont boot to either drive but my data is present on both.  I would do it all over but it's a workstation with all drivers, programs, etc all done.  It was the WD version of acronis and WD tells me they offered it as freeware and they dont take responsibility for it.  Windows USB installer cant repair anything.  I haven't tried a separate boot USB, if that would even work I'm not sure.  Any ideas what happened? I've tried everything in BIOS and the screen just says no boot media.  Not sure why the source would ever be touched in the first place and I've never had a problem with Macrium, just didnt have another licence at the time.  Any help is appreciated,  thank you

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Is there version number for then WD OEM  Acronis You are Using?

Please provide further information about the clone. What sort of drive are cloning for and to? By this I mean SATA HDD, SATA SSD, M.2 SATA SSD or M.2 NVMe SSD?

If the PC is set up for UEFI boot device should be set to Windows Boot manager (I think that is what it is called).

 It looks to me that you attempted to do a live clone, which boots into a temporary Linux installation - if something goes wrong in removing it the original drive can become unbootable. 

I believe there are ways to fix this but I am not familiar with them.

just occurred to me that Windows will not boot if both the original and the clone drive are attached. Did you remove the original drive before trying to boot the system?

Ian

IanL-S wrote:

Is there version number for then WD OEM  Acronis You are Using?

Please provide further information about the clone. What sort of drive are cloning for and to? By this I mean SATA HDD, SATA SSD, M.2 SATA SSD or M.2 NVMe SSD?

If the PC is set up for UEFI boot device should be set to Windows Boot manager (I think that is what it is called).

 It looks to me that you attempted to do a live clone, which boots into a temporary Linux installation - if something goes wrong in removing it the original drive can become unbootable. 

I believe there are ways to fix this but I am not familiar with them.

just occurred to me that Windows will not boot if both the original and the clone drive are attached. Did you remove the original drive before trying to boot the system?

Ian

 Hi Ian, I ended up re-installing everything on one of the drives but I will give the information anyways because maybe someone else will come across something like this.

The source drive was a WD Black M.2 NVMe (SN750) 500g - the destination was a WD Blue HDD 1TB.

I have a B450 Tomahawk MOBO and the only BIOS settings available are: UEFI / CSM.  When set to CSM, when adjusting boot sequence, you can choose to only accept UEFI or UEFI & Legacy drives.

It was a live drive and it did reboot to clone outside of Windows.  If that's the case, why would there be no warnings of source drive tampering?  I typically use Macrium which can clone live while Windows is running.  Also, there was no error message.

I did try removing one and then the other while trying to boot from either/or.  I also tried the HDD in another system but had the same issue.  I was however able to view all the data on the cloned drive while connected to the other system.

Thank you

Kevin, thanks for sharing the additional information requested by Ian.  The fact that your source drive was an NVMe M.2 dictates that UEFI must be used but with older versions of ATI (which your OEM WD edition may well be), the reboot to perform actions started in Windows launches a small, temporary Linux kernel OS which probably was only able to run in Legacy / CSM mode.  The Windows BCD has to be modified to launch this linux environment.

I suspect that your OS was migrated from GPT to MBR in this process and resulted in an unbootable system.

Later versions of ATI from 2018 onwards do support 'Active Cloning' where the whole clone operation is performed within Windows using the Microsoft VSS snapshot function to capture locked OS files and data.

If not using Active Cloning, then I would recommend that cloning should only be done by booting from the Acronis Rescue Media using the same BIOS mode as used by the Windows OS, i.e. UEFI in your case.  All rescue media supports both UEFI and Legacy methods of booting.

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

Steve Smith wrote:

Kevin, thanks for sharing the additional information requested by Ian.  The fact that your source drive was an NVMe M.2 dictates that UEFI must be used but with older versions of ATI (which your OEM WD edition may well be), the reboot to perform actions started in Windows launches a small, temporary Linux kernel OS which probably was only able to run in Legacy / CSM mode.  The Windows BCD has to be modified to launch this linux environment.

I suspect that your OS was migrated from GPT to MBR in this process and resulted in an unbootable system.

Later versions of ATI from 2018 onwards do support 'Active Cloning' where the whole clone operation is performed within Windows using the Microsoft VSS snapshot function to capture locked OS files and data.

If not using Active Cloning, then I would recommend that cloning should only be done by booting from the Acronis Rescue Media using the same BIOS mode as used by the Windows OS, i.e. UEFI in your case.  All rescue media supports both UEFI and Legacy methods of booting.

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

Thank you for the input Steve, that makes sense.  It's unfortunate that they don't convey this sort of information before hand for the ignorant, like myself.  Maybe in the NON-WD edition of the software they give more information but who knows.  All I was told by WD was, "it's freeware!  -Basically, what do you expect."  I did not see one warning anywhere about what this could do as I clicked my sanity away.   

Nonetheless, I have re-installed everything and back running.  This time I went back to Macrium and all is well.

Thanks to all for the insight!