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Cloning issue with 2020 just after latest upgtade

Thread needs solution

Up until the most recent upgrade I had no issue cloning my ssd drive to a duplicate ssd drive.

Both are Samsung SSD EVO 970 500 gb sticks.

As of this week, when I boot, although I can use Logme in and select, "Transfer files" and actually see the files on my original ssd drive, the screen is on but blank. I only get a small spinning arrow and mouse pointer but never see the desktop?

I can also reboot, press F8 and then select the drive I clone TO and it boots up fine, but not to the original source drive?

I can physically switch drives and then it will boot up.

I know both drives are there because I see "Cdrive and the cloned drive(no letter of course) in disk manager.

Sooo confused.

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you,
Bill

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Bill, welcome to these public User Forums.

The whole purpose of cloning is that it creates a duplicate copy of the source drive on the target drive, which includes duplicating the drive signature.

If you are booting your computer system with both source and cloned drives connected then this can and will confuse Windows because of a signature collision, which in turn can have unpredictable consequences.

The disk signature is also used by the Windows boot mechanism to identify the correct drive to boot from, so this will also be confused by having 2 disks with the same signature.

The fact that both drives will boot correctly when you physicall switch them over would support this scenario.

Steve,

I am having a similar problem except that I cloned my drive to an external drive that is now physically disconnected.  Now my SSD will not boot at all.

A little more information:

I recently migrated from an old internal HD to a SSD for my OS and installed programs.  I used AT2020 to clone my HD over to the SSD.  It went well.  I have an old external HD that I do not trust for active data storage (works fine, but it is old and a "remanufactured" drive sent as a warranty replacement for the drive I bought that failed, so I never really trusted it for critical data), but figured I could "retire it" by cloning the SSD to it and disconnecting it and storing it for a rainy day only bringing it out to clone as I install new programs/update Windows 10 etc.  I figured it would be great to have in case the SSD goes belly up (unlikely before I upgrade to a new desktop since I already had the HD that came with my desktop die, the HD that I was using for the OS is already older than that HD, but you never know), I would be able to boot from it, and clone it right back over to the replacement SSD and get my computer up and running as soon as I install the new SSD unlike the last time when I was unprepared for the HD failure and had to perform a fresh install.  But as soon as I cloned the SSD over to the external HD, it will not boot any longer. 

I noticed that when I cloned the internal HD over to the SSD that the SSD was automatically assigned as the default C drive and the computer booted from it immediately, I did not have to disconnect the internal HD.  The internal HD was automatically assigned as the F drive in Windows.  I was OK with that, but I am suspicious that something similar has happened in that Windows will not recognize my SSD as the C drive anymore because the external HD was assigned that designation and that it is "hardcoded" into the clone.

The only path forward that I can see is to hook up that external HD and clone it over to the SSD, but that would likely result in my not having a bootable backup clone. 

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you,

Paul

Paul, welcome to these public User Forums.

Do you have a backup of the working SSD from before the latest clone operation?

If yes, then I would suggest restoring the System Reserved (Legacy systems) or EFI System partition (UEFI systems) from the backup to your SSD, as it sounds like the BCD held in that partition was updated to point to the external HDD.

This is one of the reasons why it is recommended to perform cloning with the new drive already installed in the boot location internally using the Acronis Rescue media to boot the computer, and not to allow Windows to boot with two identical (source & cloned copy) drives connected.

Thank you, Steve.  Actually, I did not.  I should have, in hindsight.  I had performed a backup of the 2 TB original OS drive before moving most of the data off of it prior to cloning to the smaller SSD.  I did not think I would need to backup the new SSD, I thought I could just re-clone the old HD over if there was an issue (I assumed it was bootable).  Anyway, I futzed with things, I tried to play with the boot order trying to get either the SSD to boot or the old (internal) HD to boot.  Failing that, I do run two variants of Linux (Unbuntu and Mint) off of thumbdrives (full installations, not the kind without "persistence"), so I thought the external HD that I had cloned a copy of the SSD to would be bootable, that failed.  I ended up using the Acronis startup utility, or whatever its called, and re-cloned from the external HD back to the SSD and was finally able to get somewhere.  Because of the two Linux distributions, if the boot order gets fouled up (really the only time this happened was when I setup the Linux's on their thumbdrives), I get a "grub" screen, and when Windows works fine, I type "exit" and Windows will boot up and work with no issues, then I can re-start the computer,  go into the BIOS screen and fix the boot order and then Windows will boot up without the grub screen.  During this ordeal, I would get two "grubs" and then after typing "exit" each time, I would get a "Boot sector not found or bad boot sector ..." some error to that effect.  After re-cloning the external HD back to the SSD, I got the same "grub" screen, and after typing "exit", to my surprise, Windows booted up like it would normally do.  I re-started the computer and fixed the boot order and now everything seems to be back to normal.  I am not sure if I can clone using that external HD again, should the SSD crap out, I might test that theory before I wipe the old internal HD and try to clone the external HD again, this time back to the old internal HD, then disconnect the SSD and see how things go.

One issue that I am now having, though, that I did not have prior to cloning the SSD to the external drive is that now the primary partition of the old, internal drive is not visible in Windows.  Ironically, there was a Recovery partition on that drive that is still visible.  

Paul, thank you for your update.  You setup with multiple OS does tend to complicate matters, especially when GRUB or GRUB2 gets involved too.

If your main SSD drive is now booting correctly into Windows, then I would recommend ensuring that you have created a full disk backup of that drive on an external backup drive along with having your Acronis bootable Rescue Media so that you have this to fall back on in the event of furture issues rather than relying on cloning from your old HDD.

With regards to the new issue with the internal drive being not visible in Windows, just go into Windows Disk Management and allocate a drive letter to the missing partition to make this visible again.  The Recovery partition, if visible, should have its drive letter removed to render it invisible again.

Thank you, Steve, I will do that.  One question, about the rescue media and backup.  If I had to replace the SSD, would I be able to use the rescue media and backup to make it bootable as restore the OS and apps?

 

Paul Probus wrote:

Thank you, Steve, I will do that.  One question, about the rescue media and backup.  If I had to replace the SSD, would I be able to use the rescue media and backup to make it bootable as restore the OS and apps?

Yes, that is the whole purpose of the rescue media to be able to do a bare-metal recovery in the event of the main OS drive dying or suffering a fatal electronic issue.

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