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Clone operation stuck at 'Preparing' and goes no further.

Thread solved

Hi everybody - getting very stumped and frustrated, so maybe you folks can help! :(

I have a gentleman whose Dell laptop I am upgrading to a Crucial MX500 1TB SSD. Crucial provides a 'Crucial-fied' version of Acronis for this for free on their website, which I am using. The info in the program says it's based on Acronis True Image 2019.

The story is this - I cloned it once to a BRAND NEW drive, clone was successful, showed no errors, so I swapped the drives, but the cloned drive didn't boot, Windows was just stuck in an infinite boot loop. SO....I thought 'OK, the clone failed, maybe due to disk errors', so I wiped the clone drive, ran ChkDsk on the computer's original HDD and then tried the clone again........BUT.....on every subsequent clone, no matter which USB port I use, through using Acronis' own Cleanup Utility to remove Acronis, then reinstall it, the clone will start, then just hang on 'Preparing' and go no further....I let it go overnight and it did the same thing.

What's going on here and how can I get this drive to clone successfully so I can get this laptop back to the gentleman?

Thanks!

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See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

For safety and best practise, please ensure that you make a full disk backup of the original working HDD to an external backup drive so that any further issues arising do not result in a total loss of your customers data!

One further point, this clone should be performed on the same laptop where the new drive will be installed and not on a different PC so as to avoid any migration between Legacy & UEFI boot modes.

Steve Smith wrote:

See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

For safety and best practise, please ensure that you make a full disk backup of the original working HDD to an external backup drive so that any further issues arising do not result in a total loss of your customers data!

One further point, this clone should be performed on the same laptop where the new drive will be installed and not on a different PC so as to avoid any migration between Legacy & UEFI boot modes.

And how in the hell do you expect us to boot the acronis OEM software from a new blank SSD. There is no logic in this 

Ariel IT, welcome to these public User Forums.

And how in the hell do you expect us to boot the acronis OEM software from a new blank SSD. There is no logic in this 

Sorry but you are missing the key point here.  You are not booting any software from a blank SSD - that will be the target drive for any operation being performed, much as it would be if doing a clean install of Windows or recovering in a bare-metal scenario.

The Acronis OEM or full version software is run from bootable rescue media which depending on the type of media uses either a small Linux kernel OS environment or else uses Windows PE to provide a launch platform for the Acronis software to run from.

See KB 61632: Acronis True Image 2019: how to create bootable media
KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media
KB 61621: Acronis True Image 2019: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media