Won't boot after cloning.
I'm using Acronis Home 2015. I ahve cloned in the past with no issues. Today I attempted to clone a drive on a machine and now the machine will not boot.
The machine being clones is running Windows 64 Pro. Has four drives set up in two RAID 1's and a DVD. I was cloning the RAID's to single drives as backup. Cloning went fine and shut down after the clone. When I rebooted I was given an error "An error occured while attempting to read the boot configuration data". File\Boot\BCD.
It reccommend I do a repair install which I did and that did nothing. I did notice that it pointed to my boot drive as drive D: and it is drive C:
I suspect that something happened with drive lettering but I'm not sure how to go about correcting the situation.
Any help would be appreciated.
~Matt
Cloing dynamic disks (RAID) is not supported. When you cloned in the past, did you have RAID enabled as well?
56634: Acronis True Image 2016: Cloning Disks
Only basic disks can be cloned with Acronis True Image 2016. You cannot clone dynamic disks.
Source and target disks must have equal logical sector size. Cloning to a disk with different logical sector size is not supported. E.g., you can clone a 512 bytes/sector disk to 512 bytes/sector disk; you can clone a 4096 bytes/sector disk to 4096 bytes/sector disk; but you cannot clone a disk with logical sector size 512 bytes to disk with logical sector size 4096 bytes.
How did you perform the clone for this machine? Was this done from within Windows?
Clone was started from with in windows but it rebooted and started what appeared to be an operating system from Acronis.
Did you disconnect one of the drives after the clone completed, i.e. the source or target drive, so that you were not trying to boot with duplicate drives connected to the system?
Yes and no. The drive we cloned was removed but another drive was added in the same position as we were going to clone another drive on the same system.
When doing this, if any problems occur, the BCD may not be reset to your normal boot configuration leading to an unbootable system.
This is exactly what happened and in fact we just finished running Macrium on the system and rebuilding the boot record and so far that fixed it.
Thanks,
~Matt
Cloing dynamic disks (RAID) is not supported. When you cloned in the past, did you have RAID enabled as well?
No, past clones where single drives. I was not attempting to clone the RAID to another RAID but clone the RAID to a single drive. That is not supported?
~Matt
Unfortunately no. A clone is an exact clone of the original disk setup. I'm not sure exactly what the limitation with dynamic disks is, but any time a dynamic disk is involved (even an SSHD - hybrid drive) you're either going to get a failure, undesired results, or just wont' be able to pick the disks to begin with. Just don't clone with RAID or dynamic disks are involved and you'll save yourself trouble.
However, there is no limitation of taking a full disk image of the original RAID setup and restoring that image back to a single drive. The end results will be the same and you'll have the bonus of having a backup for safety too. Acronis even recommends taking a backup before a clone operation - just in case.
Also, don't start the clone process from within Windows - especially if you have a hardware RAID... it's risky and here's why. When you start from Windows, it has to reboot the system anyway. Then, it replaces the Windows bootloader with a new one and points it to the Linux recovery. 99 out of 100 times, Linux will not have the proper drivers to detect your RAID controller and won't even run. If Acronis fails to load at this point, your original booloader might not get put back and then you have a non-bootable system. This can be completely avoided, simply by using your offline recovery media, which is essentially just as fast, but avoids this scenario.
Also, after any clone operation, don't boot your OS until one of the cloned drives has been removed. Booting with 2 "identical" hard drives may confuse the bios and it might try to update the Windows bootloader on 1 or both disks, leaving 1 or both of them unbootable. Some people say they do this without issue, but more times than not, you're asking for trouble so I would avoid it since Acronis says not to do this.
However, there is no limitation of taking a full disk image of the original RAID setup and restoring that image back to a single drive. The end results will be the same and you'll have the bonus of having a backup for safety too. Acronis even recommends taking a backup before a clone operation - just in case.
Can you direct me to some place that spells exactly how to do this? If I'm following what you're saying to do is to image the drive, then restore that image to another drive. So if I'm following I would set it up like this.
Add two drives to my server. Image RAID 1 to one of the empty drives, then restore that image to the other empty drive, Correct?
Admittedly at this point I'm a tad gun shy so would like more concise directions if they are available some where :-)
~Matt
Matt, the process is fairly straight forward.
First, you backup your RAID 1 set (which Acronis sees as a single drive) to an external disk drive.
See the ATIH 2017 User Guide: Backing up disks and partitions for more detailed information on doing this.
Next, you connect your target drive that you want to restore the image to, along with your external drive holding the backup image created in the first step above. Assuming that you are not intending to install and boot from the target drive, but are using this as an emergency 'spare' boot drive, then you can perform the recovery of the backup image to that drive from within Windows as no restart should be needed.
See the ATIH 2017 User Guide: Recovering disks and partitions for detailed information, in particular see: Recovering partitions and disks and also the section on About recovery of dynamic/GPT disks and volumes which covers your recovering your RAID dynamic disks to a single basic volume.
- Basic volume or disk.
The target volume remains basic.
- Bare-metal recovery.
When performing a so called "bare-metal recovery" of dynamic volumes to a new unformatted disk, the recovered volumes become basic.
I didn't see any comments in there about size of backup disk. Does it have to match the size of the drive or larger similar to a clone or can the image drive be smaller? I have a couple external drives but they are smaller then the drives I'm backing up. Plenty large enough to handle the data on the drives though.
~Matt
Matt, the size of the backup disk really depends on the size of your used data on the source drive.
For example: You could have a 2TB source drive but with only 300GB of used space. You could therefore create a backup image of this 2TB source drive and fit this easily on a 320GB backup drive, assuming that you only want to make the one full backup image.
When you restore your backup image from the backup drive to a second drive, then you should be looking at a drive of a similar size to the source drive if you want to use this to replace that source drive at some time in the future, as otherwise you would need to resize the partition sizes during the restore and could end up with a very constrained system with virtually no free space to operate in for things like the Windows pagefile, hibernation and swapfiles.
The normal recommendation for backup drives would be to have one which 3 or 4 times the size of the source data to be stored on it, so for my example above, a backup drive of at least 1TB to allow multiple backups to be stored for security.
Ok thanks. I'm taking a 500GB drive with only ~150-200GB of data onto a 250GB external and then restoring it to a 1TB drive so I should be ok.
Thanks again,
~Matt
Yeah, you should be fine.
Couple of FYI's...
01) After you restore your image to the single drive, don't leave it connected - you don't want ot have "duplicates" of your OS connected to the system at the same time, especially if one is RAID and one is not.
02) If you ever plan to use the single drive in place of the dual Drive RAID 1 setup, you MAY have to break the raid on the controller (in the bios) first. You may not though. This can be tricky if you leave the RAID in tact and just slide a new drive in place of one of them. It would probably work if you removed both old drives, inserted the new one, boot (hopefully), let it show up as degraded and then add the second drive to let it rebuild the RAID onto the second disk.
As long as you have a good backup image to work with, you have options and chances to try different scenarios though. Worse case, you'd pop in 2 new drives, create the RAID set at the bios level, then restore the backup image to it and should be back up and running again.