Acronis Clone Disk Very Difficult to Understand
Some please help with what I did wrong.
My system - Dell XPS 2710 All in One. One internal hard drive, multiple USB 3.0 external ports. Backup hard drive attached to USB 3.0, Thermaltake open chassis with 2 slot drives.
OK, so here goes. I bought a 6TB WD blue. Inserted into my external chassis. Fired up acronis and did a manual clone from the internal HDD to external USB 3.0 6tb HDD. Worked fine, seemed to be good to go. Then I read that you need to swap the drives in order for cloning to work. That is, take out the original drive, put in the new drive into the Dell XPS, and stick the original drive in the USB 3.0 chassis, fire up the the recovery boot CD and proceed to clone from the original (now externalized) to the new one (now internalized). Fine. I followed the "laptop" cloning procedure, since what I have is essentially a massive laptop.
Everything fine until a simple fact. When Acronis recovery boots and I select the cloning tool, the external USB drive where the original HDD is located cannot be found. So I do not have the "source" drive visible to acronis. The system even tells that "You need 2 drives for cloning to work." After multiple attempts, I stopped, replaced the original drive in the chassis and wasted 2 hours.
Luckily, no harm. My original drive is making episodic mechanical noises and my new drive is 6TB (original 4TB). Yes, same 512 sector size, same PC.
Is this a BIOS issue? The chassis is older, but works well, and I did drop 16gb memory into it. Does well for my needs. I guess all in all very frustrating. Anybody with any suggestions as to what I did wrong? And it is true that even though I did clone the new 6tb drive successfully, it did not boot windows as the "knowledge base" indicates. Gosh, I wish this was more straightforward. I know, just recover a saved backup, but I wanted to try this cloning process, alas to no avail. Anybody please help. Thanks in advance.
Steve,
Hello! I am using the paid and licensed version of ATI 2020, user since 2014. ATI 2020 latest build. Windows 10 64 pro, latest build. Bios UEFI boot. Thermaltake external HDD chassis blackX duet. HDD is seen in Disk Management in Windows as disk 3, no driver letter assigned, this is the cloned disk that I made with ATI using windows.
I did come across MVP builder, but the driver that the thermaltake uses is circa 2006, Jmicron SCSI driver. That should be included in ATI recovery media builder, right?
Leonard, thanks for confirming you have ATI 2020.
You latest update confirms why again I am not using cloning if you need to inject drivers for your external disk dock to host your source disk for the clone operation.
I use the MVP Custom PE rescue media with the option to inject Intel RST drivers for RAID & NVMe support, plus normally include BitLocker support in the media. Beyond that, I have no extra drivers included as none are needed for doing normal Backup & Recovery operations where I only have my backup drive connected for the image being restored.
Steve,
But here's the problem....and I have read your various replies to cloning operations. You seem to not want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. Am I correct on that?
I brought up the MVP because out of research in frustration for wasting time on something that was supposed to be easy to do. We are talking about a 2006 driver. Now is that the cause for the Media Rescue Disk to not recognize an external USB HDD? I don't know.
If cloning an HDD is so problematic with ATI, why offer it as an option? It would have been much easier to say simply not supported. Yes, if I have a large case/chassis with multiple internal HDD slots, I guess it should work, but if that's the case, why not simply say that? I mean, I followed the "laptop" cloning steps to the letter from the provided user manual, to no avail. And also, why is the cloned disk not mountable from the get go? Why does it have to be cloned from "outside to in"?
Leonard, cloning is an option that can work for some users but it has limitations and gotcha's as already indicated.
One core issue in this scenario is that you are introducing additional hardware into the cloning equation, and when cloning to a drive connected via that new hardware, Acronis tries to find device drivers by invoking Universal Restore to enable the new hardware to be used in a boot scenario, which in turn breaks the boot!
Cloning from an external drive to internal helps mitigate the new hardware as Acronis only has to be able to access the external source drive and read the data from it, all hardware associated with booting the copied OS is internal and suitable drivers should already be present.
I have on occasion used cloning but that is becoming a rare event for me, especially with newer drives that need special adapters that I haven't invested in buying for one-off needs. I always make a full disk backup before starting anyway, so find it simpler to do a recovery to a new drive placed in-situ than mess with connecting a removed drive externally.
If you understand how to identify all the driver files required by your external adapter, then you can try to build the MVP Custom media after putting those files into a folder in the Drivers_Custom folder for the architecture in use, i.e. x64 or x32.
Steve, out of sheer frustration and being a long time ATI user, I installed Macrium Reflect 7. And, unfortunately, it worked like a charm. I cloned my main HDD to an external HDD, installed the cloned drive, ran restore disk to "fix boot problem" and the new cloned disk (resized partitions even) booted flawlessly. It could not have been even easier. No hunting for obscure drivers, no weird "laptop" methods to restore. I feel really bad for how ATI has handled its cloning process. I mean, Acronis is a powerhouse, right? I really like the user interface, but how Macrium handled the process felt a little embarrassing for me being an ATI user. I think if any one wishes to have a simple process of just cloning their HDD via an external USB chassis method, should read my post.
Leonard, first of all, I am glad that you have found a method that works for you as you want it! As far as I am concerned, the user is 'King'!
I am an Acronis MVP but I also have other tools installed on my main PC and others, including Macrium, Easeus, MiniTool ShadowMaker etc. I have tried other backup tools from AOMEI and Paragon at other times, and used to use Norton Ghost a long time back. The tool to use will be the one that works for the task being performed!