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Acronis MBR Error 13 - system unbootable

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While trying to make a clone of an encrypted disks I started the process within Windows and went through the wizard.  At the completion of the Wizard the program indicated that a reboot was necessary before doing the clone.  My thinking was that there was pending changes from Windows Update and that it needed to be completed before it would allow me to clone the drive.  All the other clone utilities I have used in the past worked fine within windows.

Wrong. Windows reboots and tries to boot into the Acronis WinPE envrionment.  And fails.  It briefly flashes the message MBR Error 13, and then goes into the Windows Recovery wizard.  The recovery wizard can't do anything because it doens't have the encryption drivers so it can't see the Windows partition.

 

So, how do I stop it from trying to boot into the Acronis image software and restore my MBR to the one that recognizes the encryption?  The Bootrec /FixMbr  steps listed in the recovery KB are not going to work, I need to revert back to the boot environment before Acronis Changed it, not create a new one.  I assume that Acronis would store any changes it made so it can revert them back, the question is how to flip that flag back.

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Windude2000, welcome to these user forums.

Unfortunately, you have made several mistakes that are not so easy to remedy.  

  • All Clone operations have to be performed outside of Windows and should only ever be done using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media.  
  • The Acronis bootable Rescue Media does not support the cloning of encrypted disks as has no knowledge of the encryption used nor any drivers to unlock it, so the best case would be to do a sector-by-sector copy of the source drive, but this is not guaranteed to work as the encrypted data could present as bad sectors etc.

See KB documents:

Key question: Did you make a backup of your system before you tried to perform this clone operation?  If you did, then you could try restoring the MBR and Track 0 information from that backup to your OS boot drive.  This will require that you boot from the Acronis bootable Rescue Media to do so, and unless you have another system with the same version of Acronis installed to create this media, you will need to download a copy of the .ISO file from your Acronis Account to use to create either a boot CD or copy to a USB stick using a utility such as ISOtoUSB 

The alternatives here would involve trying other guides or utilities:

See webpage: Windows won’t start – Guide for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and take a look at the various options suggested there.

Not that it helps now... but I would send feedback suggesting that a Clone operation not even be allowed from Windows if disk encyryption is active. Seems like it would make sense to build this in as a failsafe to prevent someone from getting themselves into this type of situation.

A clone is handy when it works, but there is no safety-net without a a backup and the clone documentation recommends a backup before cloning as a precaution.  Even then, Backups of encrypted drives can only be done from within windows while the disk is unlocked

With encrypted drives:  1) Backup must be taken while system is booted into the OS and unlockeed

2) Clones are not supported at all because a clone needs to be taken after the system has rebooted... hence when the drive is locked/encrypted. Sector-by-sector backup may be able to work on an encrypted drive, but I wouldn't count on it as the only option.

The only way I see walking away from this is if you have a good backup from before the clone attempt.  Alternatively, if you can boot into the Windows recovery environment (Windows installation disk) and attempt to decrypt the drive completely from there, you might then be able to run startup repair and fix the bootloader after that.