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Source Drive Destroyed by Cloning Operation

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I have Acronis True Image 10.0 and have used it successfully in the past. Last week I tried to clone a 320gb laptop drive (with about 25gb of data on it) to an 80gb Intel Mainstream SSD. I did this by attaching both drives (SATA) to a computer I use for projects - neither was the boot drive for the computer. When this completed successfully I received a message "NTDLR is missing". When I tried to use my Windows 7 Installation disk it refused to copy the NTDLR file even though I could see it in the D frive directory. So, I went back to the original 320gb drive and it had the same error!Has anyone ever seen the source drive corrupted in this manner?

I then conducted an experiment using the boot drive in my project computer and a spare 160gb drive I had on hand and, sure enough, I got exactly the same effect - both source and target drives were unbootable with an "NTDLR missing" error. In this case, I was using Windows XP Pro. Again, I couldn't copy the file from my XP SP3 disk so my computer was effectively dead.

The only thing that I can think of is that I left both drives still connected when I rebooted after the clone completed.
Is it possible that this is the cause of the problem? Can I never have this happen by just disconnecting the source drive before rebooting?

Rgrds-Ross

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Have you checked that the NTLDR file is actually missing? Sometimes it's just that the wrong partition is set Active. Also, check that the BIOS boot order is still correct. Connecting and disconnecting drives can cause order changes in some (the BIOS may be trying to boot the wrong drive).

If the file is missing, you could try using robocopy from the Windows 7 DVD to copy the file.

It's never a good idea to boot Windows with identical drives (cloned) connected. This can cause all sorts of problems.

And, yes, there were some problems with some versions of TI that caused the source drive to be rendered unbootable after cloning.

You have to disconnect the old drive before booting into windows. Try running the Windows 7 repair disk.