Acronis WD version used for Cloning

Cloning the disk back to a new laptop is risky, because any difference in hardware between the old and the new computer might result in your needing to do a Universal Restore, and not a clone.

If the laptop is exactly the same model from about the same manufacturing time, there is little chance of a significant change of hardware, so you could then try to clone your disk back to the laptop disk.

What is important is to NOT reboot with both the original disk and the newly cloned disk attached at the same time to the machine. This typically results in Windows corruption.

Thanks for your reply Pat.

First some background, my Laptop hard-drive was already failing and Windows Backup would not proceed so thats the reason I started looking for alternatives and since My Passport External USB HD already came with Acronis (made for WD), I decided to give it a try and it encountered bad sectors too - but it had an alternative to proceed along - and I took it - and I counted only 5 sectors where it stalled - and since the laptop was working fine and applications were opening all these years I thought that most likely the bad sectors were part of some obscure file(s) - most of the 80 GB or so of my total data is junk apart from a few data files and the OS and main applications - so I could not care less if they were there or not. Before I started the cloning, I did exclude some partitions - tools and recovery which were not crucial and I thought that might make it easier and take less time - but it spent a lot of time I dont know doing what - before it started writing files onto the external drive. No more errors were encountered and after about 8-10 hours it completed and rebooted right away (yes the external HD was still connected which I have since understood should not have been) instead of shutting down as I thought it would do since that option was selected. Anyway when it booted up, it came up saying winload.exe was missing or corrupt and I tried HP system recovery and USB recovery disk - did not work. Lastly even the HD diagnostics failed. So at least in this case, it looks like more than anything else the stress of being accessed for 8-10 hours killed it (It was a Toshiba 750GB about 5 years old) because even if the data got corrupted on the HD, it still should not be failing hardware diagnostics I think.

So no, I will not be restoring to a New Laptop - I am hoping to get the Cloned data from this external HD onto the same Laptop's new HD installed in this Laptop's bay after discarding the failed HD. Since I cannot use the Windows based Acronis for this and Acronis should be part of a boot disk. Which version software should I buy for this purpose?

Also I went ahead and did a Windows backup of another computer - a Desktop - onto this external USB HD without doing anything to the earlier cloned data since this external USB HD is 1TB in size and the 2 backups together do not exceed 200 GB. This went throught fine since the drive was good. I see only a couple of Directories added by Windows backup at the root level - FileHistory and WindowsImagebackup by Windows Backup. I do not think this should affect the cloned disk as regards the data cloned from the problem laptop in anyway.

When the cloned data goes back into the new HD for this Laptop (assuming I find that Acronis has a way to do this using paid software if need be) I plan to simply delete these extra directories - which have nothing in common with the original cloned Data files from the Laptop's new restored HD.

If the right way to clone (as suggested by some on the Internet) is to take the original HD from the laptop, put it in a SATA to USB caddy and connect it as external HD to a USB port on the Laptop and use a bootable Acronis disk to clone onto a new HD installed into the Laptop, Cloning to an external HD (atleast under Windows) should never be allowed - assuming it can detect this is what the user is trying to do - or atleast warn users not to do this . What is the point of wasting time after it if it is going to be useless anyway? Many users have gone this route and then backtracked - since the version I had only could clone, I never had a choice but never did I think that it would be completely useless - even if unbootable. I have no idea about cloning internals - and even if I cannot restore the OS and I manage to do a clean install the hard way can I atleast get my applications back - all as installed - so I do not have to do it one by one?  - even this would be a big if it can be done. I can see and read any and all data files from the cloned external USB drive (connected to the working desktop) so there seems to be no problem in this regards - atleast no obvious corruption.

Thanks a lot for considering to share your thoughts.

Edward Pillai wrote:

Thanks for your reply Pat.....yes the external HD was still connected which I have since understood should not have been...

OK.

...So no, I will not be restoring to a New Laptop - I am hoping to get the Cloned data from this external HD onto the same Laptop's new HD installed in this Laptop's bay after discarding the failed HD.

Good. Try to clone the disk back to your new hard drive.

You might even be able to take the disk out of your USB enclosure and put it as the new laptop disk. Might work...

If the right way to clone (as suggested by some on the Internet) is to take the original HD from the laptop, put it in a SATA to USB caddy and connect it as external HD to a USB port on the Laptop and use a bootable Acronis disk to clone onto a new HD installed into the Laptop,

It is the safest way, but cloning "in place" works almost all of the time.