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Disk clone to SSD failing

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Hi,

This is with Acronis True Image OEM 19.0.5128. Not technically supported here I know, but I'm hoping to get some advice anyway.

I'm trying to clone the old 320 GB SATA HD in my laptop (Acer Travelmate 5742, Windows 7 Pro SP1) to a new Kingston 1 TB SSD, and this is the software that came with it, but so far no attempt as worked.

Note: Chkdsk /f /r was run on the original disk before doing anything, with zero errors reported.

Attempt 1

I initially started the disk clone from within Windows. I since read on the forum that this is not recommended, but nevertheless this was the first attempt. I went with the "Manual" method, but all I did this for was the adjust the sizes of the new (expanded) partitions. All other settings I left alone.

I did see a message that looked like a warning - "The selected disk will be restored as is (disk's layout will remain MBR)". I don't know if this is a problem, but there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it and my original disk is MBR as far as I'm aware.

So this was performed with the disk straight out of the box, unitialised, and connected with a USB enclosure. The computer rebooted and then ran the clone and it all seemed to go fine. Took a few hours with no errors reported. However, on swapping out the old HD for the SSD and switching back on, the laptop just got stuck in an endless rebooting loop at the BIOS screen. I could even access the BIOS or boot options before it reset or force a shutdown so in the end I had to just pull the battery.

Attempt 2

This time I made a recovery disk and booted from that to perform the clone. This time I also selected "Automatic" instead of "Manual" and tried again. This reported more steps and took longer. Again, no errors were reported, but after the operation was complete and the drives were swapped, the end result was the same. Reboot loop and I had to pull the battery to get out of it.

At this point I did try swapping the drives back and attempting to boot from the new drive whilst connected via USB. This did actually get further and as far as seeing "Starting Windows", but then it crashed with a BSOD.

At this point I thought perhaps the SSD itself was faulty, or at least incompatible with my laptop when mounted internally for some reason (even though it works fine via USB). So I did a clean format of the disk to NTFS and then mounted it inside my laptop. I was able to boot into the BIOS and the recovery disk no problem, so from this I deduce that the SSD itself is fine and not causing the reboot loop directly.

Attempt 3

I decided to try a Backup/Restore this time. As far as I understand this would have given me the original partition sizes so would have required extra work afterwards, but would have been a start.

First I booted from the recovery disk and performed a backup of the original drive (mounted internally). This was a full disk image backup, no compression, to a .tib image file.

Then I swapped in the SSD, booted from the recovery disk and attempted a restore from the .tib file. All boxes ticked, including "Restore Drive Signature".

After about half an hour I got a pop-up that the operation had failed. Checking the logs shows the messages:

"The backup is corrupted, but you can still try to recover data from it."

and

"Disk '\local\hd_gpt([long string of numbers])' has invalid BIOS number 0. 129 will be used instead."

I found another post on here saying that the latter message is possibly benign and it should still copy okay, but it didn't.

So then I run a validation on the backup .tib image. Kind of unsurprisingly it passed validation with no errors reported.

I think I've given all the relevant information there, but am happy to answer question. At this point there doesn't appear to be anything else obvious to try, other than mounting the SSD in the machine and the old HD via USB and trying the clone that way round, but I don't see any obvious reason to expect better results. Other than that I could give AOMIE Backupper a try. There is another post here where someone resorted to that and had better luck, but he did state that he had to edit the BIOS to get that working and I wouldn't know what edit to make.

Any advice gratefully appreciated.

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Michael, welcome to these public User Forums.

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.

I did see a message that looked like a warning - "The selected disk will be restored as is (disk's layout will remain MBR)". I don't know if this is a problem, but there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it and my original disk is MBR as far as I'm aware. 

The above is a confirmation that the partition scheme used on the disk is unchanged.  The message would be different if the scheme is being changed and would warn about possible consequences!

At this point I did try swapping the drives back and attempting to boot from the new drive whilst connected via USB. This did actually get further and as far as seeing "Starting Windows", but then it crashed with a BSOD.

Sorry but Microsoft work at preventing Windows from being started from USB drives unless they have been created using a special method as 'Windows 2 Go'.

Using Backup & Recovery is normally the best and most successful method to use so a puzzle as to why the backup was reported as being corrupt during recovery.

See forum topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I have documented (with images) the process that I have used multiple times for my own laptops using Backup & Recovery. 

Thanks Steve,

I realise the OEM version is not technically supported here, but as it seemed to be a software problem rather than a hardware problem it seemed better to come to the horse's mouth. Especially since the vendor-specified method didn't work (and seemed to be in contradiction of the advice in KB 2931 that you linked to).

It looks like my experience (aside from the failed restore operation) tallies with what KB 2931 says and I had made a clone that was bootable from USB instead of when connected via SATA, and that was only failing because of Microsoft security that you mentioned.

So it sounds like I should, after all, try cloning again, this time with my old drive mounted via USB and the new SSD installed inside the laptop. I will give that a try.

The clone with the old HD mounted via USB and the new SSD mounted inside the laptop has worked! Thank you Steve for pointing me at the KB article. As I say, that is exactly the opposite of the instructions given by Kingston.

So I'm happy that the issue is resolved, but I have two outstanding questions:

1) Any idea what the error message were about when I tried the restore from the backup, even though the backup passed validation?

2) A curious thing, but the first clone attempt I did was "Manual" so that I could resize the partitions to be non-propotional (i.e., adding most of the new extra space to one partition rather that sharing it equally). Evey clone I did since then, even the "Automatic" ones, re-used the same partition sizes I set up the first time. Given that the SSD had been re-formatted and I was booting from a read-only CD, where was Acronis getting these sizes from?

Michael, glad that the clone has been successful when following the advice from the Acronis KB document.

The error message could be from a variety of areas and you would need to have saved the log for the operation while still working in the rescue environment to try to get any better understanding.  Those logs are volatile and lost when restarting the PC.

The resizing on cloning is a little hit & miss in my experience and I rarely ever use clone for my own systems as I find Backup & Recovery to be safer to use, plus any resizing of partitions can be done using a partition manager such as MiniTool Partition Wizard (free) very easily.