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Unable to lock the disk. Boot your computer from a linux-based media

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My goal is to clone my 1T drive to 500 crucial SSD.  I am using   C: Drive partitioned off with C drive approx 984 using only 375G of it.   D drive is recovery drive approx 15G.   I have enough space on the SSD to cover both used drives.  I tried using software that came with it with crucial which is Acronis tailored for crucial device 2019 version.  The clone got almost to the end when it quit and said "Disc cloning failed  see log for detail".  According to crucial, they said this happens when it tries to access the recovery drive and it is locked.  They said try using the bootup version of Acronis on usb drive which I did. on bootup from usb drive and trying to clone, I get the above message when I select my source drive.   I don't have linux computer.  I don't want to mess with unlocking drives, which can get me into trouble.  I decided to buy Acronis on web hoping this would be fixed and tried again, to no avail I am getting the same unlock message on selection of source drive.  I tried the suggestions in prior comments and it does not fix it.  Can someone please help?  This looked so easy, which is why I decided to buy it. 

 

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Verna, welcome to these public User Forums.

When the error message says to use Linux based media, it is meaning the Acronis Rescue Media which you can create using the Acronis Rescue Media Builder program in Windows, by taking the Advanced option then selecting to create Linux based media.

If you have not already done so, then I would recommend making a full Disks & Partitions backup of your current 1TB HDD drive and storing this on an external backup drive - this is your safety net in case anything goes badly wrong!

The common cause of the error about unable to lock the disk is normally caused because the PC was not shutdown fully when using rescue media to boot, i.e. when Windows Fast Start is being used and the system does a Hybrid Sleep instead of doing a Shutdown and the disk is locked to prevent changes while it is in this state.

The way around this is to either do a full shutdown by pressing / holding a Shift key while clicking on Shutdown, or else to do a Windows Restart and use the BIOS options to override the normal boot device.

Note: you can also go into the Windows 10 Settings panel > Update & Security > Recovery and use the Advanced start-up option to select the alternative boot device for the rescue media.

To add to the above using the Advanced Startup method you can also choose Advanced Startup then click on Resart which will give you a menu of boot options one of which is Safe mode.  Selecting option 4 will restart the machine in Safe Mode.  you can at that point logon and then after you see the Windows GUI appear simply use Windows poser options to shutdown the PC.  This action will result in an unlocked disk.

Thank you all!!   I knew about the shift key and shutdown which I did!  But I also had other problems too and I would get clone failed at the end.   My hard drive was bad and although I have run chkdsk before on it, it needed to be done again as it had bad sectors on it.  From what I seen from other videos, Acronis uses sector-by-sector copy when it finds problems with the source drive, thereby running out of space on my new ssd, instead of adjusting it to fit.  All is well, I got it all to work a couple of days ago, using the Linux method. I eventually figured it out. Thanks again!