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9 years of Data lost! Acronis corrupted hard drive after cloning

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Having a really big issue right now, hoping I have not lost a 9 year old hard drive with a huge amount of valuable data on it.

I recently encrypted my HD with veracrypt, all good and working. I needed to clone this drive to a new HD for safety as it was old. I didn't have much luck using mini partition wizard so I tried Arconis. It didn't give me any warnings about ecoling encrypted hard drives, so it needed to reboot. Upon reboot I got MBR error 1 and MBR error 3.

A google search comes up with tonnes of complaints about the software corrupting hard drives, especially encrypted hard drives as it somehow messes up the boot on it. Veracrypt has it's own boot and I somehow need to disable Acronis from booting (if its doing that). 

I've been trying all day to fix this. I was using a Windows 10 USB bootable key to get into cmd prompt, tried the Bootrec commands didnt work. Also tried disk part commands to make the hard drive primary and active after I made the new one also active, so try and see if this would be an issue due to both harddrives conflicting as they both are sent to active. That didnt work.
Made a bootable Windows 7 usb key, as the old HD is on win 7, cmd prompt also didnt work. 

I'm really struggling for options and have a lot of my companies documents on this HD along with personal documents. I don't want to have to fork out £400+ for professional recovery.

I think this might have more to do with Veracrypt MBR being corrupted potentially, or that Arconis has set it to try and boot with a different MBR but its not working. 
I tried using Veracrypt.exe in a new Win 10 OS, and tried to decrypt it using my PW and pin but it came up with some errors. 

Managed to mount it but it was being buggy, took like 10 attempts and every time it would be random. 

Got the drive mounted but couldn't access anything. Could not decrypt it either. 

Loaded EaseUS backup environment onto a USB, tried to rebuild MBR and scan fix, says it successfully rebuilt the MBR and that there were no errors apart from no F: Parameters set. 

I've tried booting up in IDE and ACHI mode - displays insert bootable media when the main hard drive is set as #1 boot. 

I can mount it with the option preboot without authentication then put in the PW and PIN. it will mount, but I cant do anything from there, access it or decrypt it :/

I need help and will tip the person who finds me a solution! My lifes work is on the HD. .. Lipssealed

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I am a little bit confused. The first question is about the original HDD. Am I correct in assuming that during the cloning process something happened that means you can no longer access that HDD? Presumably the new drive also cannot be accessed. Did you do the cloning from within windows or using the recovery media (it is safer to use the recovery media as it avoids the need to copy the Linux recovery media to the HDD with risk that something can go wrong.

On re-reading your post, I see that the computer apparently only has one HDD, so did you just encrypt the entire HDD or just the data files?

Not sure if the problem you are seeing is the result of Acronis only (officially) supporting Windows bitlocker encryption or because cloning went wrong independently of the encryption process. The unanimous advice of Acronis MVPs is to create a buackup of a drive before attempting a cloning.

As the windows installation is unbootable, have you tried mounting the drive in a USB dock and attaching it to another computer. How far this will get you depends on the extent of the damage to the drive. The information on rebuilding the MBR offers some hope that this may progress the matter (assuming that the drive used MBR rather than GPT, in which case irreparable damage may have been done.

Ian

 

My only and usual HD was a WD ears 500GB HD. I wanted to upgrade this to the new performance range 1TB black HD's that WD have. The drive itself was encrypted with veracrypt. Upon using Acronis to clone the old HD to new one, it needed to restart to carry out the cloning. When restarting this is when the error happened. I got the MBR error.

Both drives are in MBR, not GPT. I'm on the new HD now with a fresh copy of windows trying to recover the data and using scanning software but due to encryption I won't have any luck.

Cloning was not done in recovery media, but in the windows 7 OS itself. I think I only encrypted the main partition (1) which holds most of my data, but im not sure, as I always need to provide the PW and PIN for authentication on start up. I'm almost certain I only encrypted the partition as Veracrypt doesn't let you encrypt the whole drive without formatting. 

 

I was essentially trying to make a backup :( 

I was afraid this was what may have happened.

For many years I have used separate HDD/SSD for OS and data (except with notebooks, where I create a separate partition for the data). 

I have not use Veracrypt so I am clutching at straws. From what I have read Veracrypt creates a hidden file within which the encrypted data is held. The trick is to find that file and see if you can open it with Veracrypt using the password and PIN. I suggest you check out the Veracrypt www site for information on how it works and how to open encrypted partition on a computer other than the one it was created on.

Have you tried using your Veracrypt rescue disk? It may be able to help you recover the important files. There may be other help to be fund on the Veracrypt www site, in particular the user forum.

Update: I would not try to do an actual recovery with the scanning software. Just save the results of the scan to a USB stick and try the Veracrypt recover disk. (Trying to recover using the recovery software may cause more damage.)  If it does not work then go back to the recovery software. 

Ian

I don't have a hidden OS on the drive if that's what you mean. Im trying to get the rescue disk to work but I need to need a working encrypted partition to make one. Very strangle. 

Thanks for the update. It does seem a roundabout way of proceeding. Hopefully it will work on the damaged disk.

It is a good idea to create rescue media in anticipation of things going wrong. Unfortunately I frequently forget to do so.

Looks like the issue is I need the rescue disk .iso. But I can't make one, any tips on finding this? 

This could be my final and only solution. Trying to put the HD on another PC, and mounting it without pre-authentication. If I can't get the rescue disk from the encrypted partition it will be lost forever as they are unique. Wow, should of came with a warning about this...

 

https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/technical/thread/8e3cc4e…

 

Sorry to hear of these problems - this is one of the reasons why I wrote the forum topic: 
[IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this!!!

Unfortunately, this topic will not help you recover your lost encrypted drive.  I wish you every luck in trying to retrieve the Veracrypt rescue disk ISO if this is only available on the encrypted disk - is there no option to download this from the Veracrypt website?