MBR to MBR clone
This product is painful. I'm on my third day trying to clone a drive. I created a clone which forced to GPT. Surprise, it didn't boot. Looked for answers on your forums and and other places. Turns out that the safest way to clone is to clone MBR to MBR. Kind of the definition of "Clone" to me. Support forum here says I can control mbr vs GPT if I use manual clone. If I can, I can't figure out how. Personally I think products should empower you not restrict you (save you). Can anyone help? -Boyd


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If the clone tool is forcing your new disk to be formatted in GPT then chances are you are booting the Recovery Media incorrectly. The Recovery Media will display itself twice in the boot selection. One entry will show the media by device name only and the other will show the media by device name preceded by UEFI. To insure MBR is used in the media you must select the media that does not have UEFI preceding the device name.
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Been there done that. Just last week. I can relate to his frustration.
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Steve Smith wrote:Note: you can try using the Manual mode when Cloning in Windows but this requires careful planning before starting to identify the correct partition sizes as these need to be configured individually.
Please ignore the above note! I tested this earlier today and there is no method provided by ATI 2020 to select that the target drive for the Clone remain as MBR if this is being performed on a system which is booted in UEFI / GPT mode.
This means that you must either use the Acronis Rescue Media booted in Legacy mode to do this, or else use a different application! The free version of Macrium Reflect did perform a MBR to MBR clone when running on my UEFI / GPT booted Windows 10 laptop, using 2 external USB drives as the source & target drives.
To me, this is short-sighted on the part of Acronis to not provide the same functionality as their competitors have!
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Ditto to Steve's last comment. Been saying it for years... a clone should be a clone - an exact copy, nothing more, nothing less. Beyond that, then give some additional options to change the disk layout as an extra step, if need be, for when people need to migrate from legacy to UEFI.
For me.. process would be:
01. Clone default selection would result in an exact disk layout of the source disk cloned to the destination disk
02. Before proceeding, identify if there is a a difference between the disk layout of the destination compared to the host system OS boot drive (in case cloning a different disk from a different system) and offer to change if need be, but recommend to keep the original disk layout as is
03. Warn if converting a GPT disk Legacy Disk (based on a user selection to modify the disk layout instead of taking the default of an exact clone). You typically can't go backward from GPT to MBR and remain bootable. Not an issue for purely data drives though.
04. Warn if converting a Legacy disk to GPT disk (based on user selection if not taking the default). Changing the disk layout may make it non-bootable unless bios changes have been made (not all systems support legacy and UEFI booting, or may need manual interaction to allow it).
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All,
This issue can be fixed by adding True Image support for Boot Mode in Recovery Options as is available in the Acronis Backup 12.5 product.
Look HERE
Suggest using feedback and Wish list to request this feature.
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Bob, that sounds like the ideal solution but looking at the AB 12.5 user guide, I don't see any mention of Cloning as an option which is at the heart of this topic.
I did test to see if I could get ATI 2020 to Recover a MBR disk image to a second disk (to emulate cloning) but this too always wanted to mirror the boot mode of the system being used and convert to GPT on recovery.
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Yup - that's pretty much the missing link (although would need to be different way to check since most of this is all done with local disks - should be easy enough to compare the 2 disks though and/or just offer which option to use).
I also agree with submitting feedback - done it a few times myself.
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Steve,
Yes, I agree there is no mention of Cloning in the 12.5 guide. My thinking is that is due to the 12.5 app not supporting cloning. I would think it possible to add Clone operations to support the Boot Mode feature.
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