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Source drive showing as unformatted after clone

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So I tried to do a clone to a new HDD, I installed True Image and followed the Clone Disk Wizard, selected source and destination disks. Laptop rebooted and the procedure started. Left it run over night, woke this morning and the laptop was off as I selected to shut down when complete. So I installed the new HDD hit the power button...... nothing.... no panic, I'll just throw the old HDD back in and try again, so I popped in the old HDD back in hit the power button.....nothing!!!!... pulled out the old HDD connected to my PC via USB and the drive is showing as unformatted in disk management WTF.... I know I can just run some recovery software and try and retrieve the data that way but the reason I was cloning was due to certain software that was installed, has anyone have this happen to them before.. any reason why the source disk would format??

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I have never had that happen, but then I do not recall ever attempting to clone a Laptop HDD. Not sure why this would happen unless you accidentally reversed the source and target drives with would (unfortunately) produce the result you are seeing. [I would call that a prime example of a senior's moment - of which I am having more and more recently.]

I always work on the assumption that if something can go wrong it will go wrongs. So I always backup a drive before considering doing a clone.

Acronis recommend that when cloning a Laptop, to place the new drive in the laptop than clone from the old dive in a USB dock (usefully I do not recall seeing this advice in the user manual, but it is mentioned in one of the Knowledge Base document: ). This necessarily involves using recovery media. [Things can also go "pear-shaped" using the Wizard from within Windows, particularly if the computer reboots and uses a temporary Linux installation to do the cloning.]

Ian

Jonny, welcome to these public User Forums.

Ian is correct with regard to the recommendation of how laptop drives should be cloned.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

Please see forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this - which was written after dealing with many cloning issues in the forums, including those similar to your scenario.  One of the key messages was to always make a full Disk backup image <<before>> doing any clone so as to have a safety net in the event of any mistakes, 'senior moments' or plain simple glitches such as a power loss etc.

If you have chosen the correct source & target drives for the clone operation, then there is no reason why the source drive should have been wiped to become uninitialised.  At this point you either need to have a disk backup to recover it from, or else try any partition / disk recovery tools.