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Disk Clone didn't work

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I had a working 80GB Seagate hard drive (sata I). It was running Windows 7 Ultimate just fine.
I was. however, having performance issues with Media Center and thought that perhaps having a slow hard drive might be the problem. So I tried to use Disk Clone to clone to a sata II drive - also Seagate 80GB.

The steps seemed all intuitive and it all looked so smooth.
I used the Recovery CD I made from the Windows applicaton.

It said that it would make the dest. drive bootable.

So I went though the clone, pulled the sata connector off the first drive and cold started.
It didn't load - just sat there saying "GRUB".

Then I went back to the first hard drive only, and now it only boots into the Acronis Boot Loader and will not go into Windows if I choose it.

So I now have two drives that are not usable. Luckily, this was not a fatal error - I just rebuilt from scratch.

However, I do plan on replacing (on our main home computer with all the important stuff) the sata II drive with an ssd someday. I want to make sure that Acronis disk clone will work.

Any ideas on what went wrong?

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Without knowing the exact steps you had taken, I can only guess about the Grub and Acronis loader issues.

If you did not try and perform the clone from within Windows, the only reason the Acronis boot loader would be on your disk is if you had Acronis's F11 Startup Recovery Manager Enabled on the source drive. If you cloned the drive with this enabled, and then "pulled the sata" cable off the source drive and tried to boot, it is possible that the boot loader is looking for a different physical disk to boot Windows.

In addition if both drives were still connected to your system at first boot after the clone, the problems may be related to Windows seeing two identical drives with the same disk signatures and boot loaders, and becoming confused and causing registry or boot manager/loader issues on both drives.

In the future, for best cloning results. Place the target drive where the source drive normally hooks up. Place the source drive on a secondary connector or in an external enclosure. Boot to the rescue media, and perform the clone from the source to the target, and turn off the system when the cloning operation is complete. You do not have to exit the Rescue Media to turn the system off. Disconnect the source drive, then start the system. If everything works as it should, you could then shut the system down and reconnect the original source drive as a second drive, boot the system and do with it as you wish (format it, etc.)