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An operating system wasn't found error after cloning

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I performed a cloning operation of my Windows 7 to a new HD but am now unable to boot from any HD.
I get the message: "An operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operational system". Can anyone help me solve this problem? Thanks.

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I don't have encouraging news. I suspect that instead of cloning your working system onto a fresh disk, you cloned the fresh disk onto the working system disk. Result is that you have two unformatted disks.

I suspect that you misidentified the disks when choosing the source and target for the Clone, because the Linux environment enumerates disks differently than Windows does. That's why we recommend that you add a recognizable label to every disk, so you can uniquely identify it without using the drive letter.

Your options at this point: it depends on what you did prior to the Clone. Did you make any sort of system backup, either with Acronis True Image Home or with Windows' own protection? If so, you can use it to restore the working system. If you have no such backup, then you are likely faced with re-installation of Windows. If your system came with a recovery partition (as many Dells, Sonys, and other major brands do) you could restore the system to factory state using that recovery process, rather than manually reinstalling Windows.

After returning to a working Windows installation, you could add back your data files if you kept a backup of them.

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.

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.

Before giving up all hope, find yourself a disk utility and check to see if the disk is marked 'Active', if it isn't, mark it as 'active' and see if Windows is happy again. Make sure only one disk containing the OS is attached at the time of boot for the moment.

Hi everybody,

I got the same message as Alvaro using Windows 10 and Acronis 2016. However, I have checked the names of the source and target disk very carefully and I am pretty sure that I did not make a mistake. Even if for some reason the two HDDs had been confused, the old one contained was the last clone and should therefore the built-in disk should now contain a working Windows 10 operating system. At first, cloning did not work and I used work around provided by Acronis where an entry in the registry was made. Anyone experienced difficulties like that?

 

Olaf, welcome to these user forums.

Please provide more details of what steps you performed in making the clone of your disk drives?

Did you make a full backup image of your source HDD before attempting the clone?

Did you boot from the Acronis Rescue Media to perform the clone outside of Windows?

If you are running ATIH 2016 as per your post, then I would request that you create a new topic in the Acronis True Image 2016 Forum rather than tagging on to the end of this very old topic in the forum for obsolete products.

Thanks Steve, I will switch to the other forum. However, before I do that, I will email the German support and wait for their reply, finally found a guideline how to do that...