How to clone with disk signature? Can't migrate to new drives...
I have an issue migrating my system to new drives as upon reboot, the drive letters change and the only way I recall having the ability to do this in the past is with Symantec Ghost, running it with the -FDSP switch.
I was sure Acronis had this as an option as I vaguely recall checking it before.
Acronis disk cloning is useless for me for this purpose unless there's another way to retain drive letters when cloning or if there's a PE utility that can do it. It cannot be done after boot since I have Program Files on a drive I'm trying to migrate.
Sorry I should be clear that this is working with the downloadable *nix boot media and the imaging is occurring in another system as the disc doesn't seem to agree with my primary system.
Basically what was originally P: drive is now F: drive on the new drive when its inserted in the system.
C: drive isn't an issue but the other drives remap to the closest available drive.
Assuming you are running Windows you can change the assigned drive letters using the Windows 'Disk Management' - on my Win 8 I did a seacrh for Disk, and it show 'formatting' - if you select that it take you to Disk Management.
The remapping of drive letters can happen ... for some reason the OS thinks that drive letters have not been assigned for some, or all, drives. I most frequently see this with my blueray/DVD drives. Fortunately it is easily fixed.
Ian
Assuming you are running Windows you can change the assigned drive letters using the Windows 'Disk Management' - on my Win 8 I did a seacrh for Disk, and it show 'formatting' - if you select that it take you to Disk Management.
The remapping of drive letters can happen ... for some reason the OS thinks that drive letters have not been assigned for some, or all, drives. I most frequently see this with my blueray/DVD drives. Fortunately it is easily fixed.
I only wish it were that easy. Unfortunately this problem is a little more advanced than that.
I either need to clone the disk and preserve the signature, as other cloning software packages allow, or use the same signature from the previous disk, copying and pasting through diskpart.
This link explains disk signatures if you're curious: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2011/11/08/3463572.a…
I think more information may be useful. Are the drives with the incorrect letter on the same HDD as the boot partition or a different one? (I've used dedicated physical disk for booting for so long that I forget that it is common to have multiple partitions on disk 0.
Are you cloning several HDDs at the same time, or just one?
Ian
My best advice: Do not Clone! Instead, do one extra step and create a full disk Backup to an external drive. If ever you need to return to that image state, you would do a full disk Restore/Recovery.
There is rarely a need to Clone. Really, Backup is safer and more flexible. Many users encounter problems Cloning which they would not have if they had instead used Backup.
1. Don't use Clone. Do a full disk mode Backup, selecting the entire disk, and a Restore. The end result will be the same as Clone, but with many advantages.
2. Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots.
In particular, 29618: Grover's new backup and restore guides http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618
A full disk backup, selecting the disk checkbox rather than individual partitions, includes everything. It includes everything that a clone would include.
The difference is that while a clone immediately writes that information a single time to another drive, a backup is saved as a compressed .tib archive. As such, multiple .tib archives may be saved to a single backup drive, allowing for greater redundancy, security and flexibility.
Once a full disk image .tib archive is restored to a drive, the result is the same as if that drive had been the target of a clone done on the date and time that the backup archive was created.
Clone is riskier because we've seen situations where users mistakenly choose the wrong drive to clone from and to, thus wiping out their system drive.
When you restore a full disk backup, you may choose to restore the disk signature.
That sounds like more work than would be involved with competitive products which offer cloning functions with the option to also clone with disk signatures.
In the end I used diskpart to copy the disk signature and used a competitive product to clone my other drive so I can avoid the diskpart steps.
In the event anyone else encounters this and searches the forum, you can manually migrate MBR disk signatures as follows at a command line:
diskpart
list desk
sel disk <#>
(pick the number of the disk you need to get the signature for)
detail disk
(this will show you the signature of the disk)
Hook up the disk you need to apply the signature to if its not already hooked up and once you've selected the disk you need to apply the signature to, use the command in diskpart to apply it:
uniqueid disk id=########
(where the #'s are the actual signature that you want to apply to the drive)
That sounds like more work than would be involved with competitive products which offer cloning functions with the option to also clone with disk signatures.
ATI does clone including disk signature. I simply offer my advice that backup/restore is much safer than cloning, no matter what program you choose.