Is it ok to backup a MBR bootable drive in other PC running Windows 8 with GPT drive?
Hi, This question is related to saving some time. I have an older laptop that has a SATA II drive and only USB 2.0 ports. Its drive is working ok but I want to upgrade it. I realize that I could attach a external USB disk, boot the laptop with the Acronis v11.5 boot disk, backup the laptop, shutdown, install the new drive, restore the backup image to the new drive, and be done. However, USB 2.0 is very time consuming when drives have a lot of used capacity (this one has ~150GB used). So, to save time, would this work: Remove the old drive from the laptop. Connect it (via hot plug in a removable drive tray) to a Win8 PC (that has a UEFI BIOS and a GPT OS disk) via SATA III on motherboard. (Btw, I already have the hot-plug/hot-insert procedure refined on this machine.) Make a backup image of the old drive to a disk on the PC with Acronis Backup v11.5 (that's already installed on the PC) while Windows 8 is running. Unplug the old drive from the PC and plugin the new drive to the PC. Restore the image to the new drive. Unplug the new drive and reinstall in the laptop. Would that work? Or, am I going to run into issues because the "live" Win8 is going to not like an Active MBR disk attached? Or, am I going to run into issues because the "live" Win8 is going to write MBR or boot sector code to the freshly restored new disk, and then it won't boot when reinstalled into the laptop? Or, am I going to run into issues because immediately after the restore is completed, the "live" Win8 is not going to like having that newly restored new laptop drive attached because it has an Active MBR partition? So for the elongated post. I appreciate your comments and suggestions on this. Thanks . . .
Hi Fedor,
Sorry it took me so long to return to this post. Thanks for the informative and helpful reply :-)
I read that other post completely. Is this issue ever going to get resolved? Like the other people, I too need to be able to restore the partition scheme exactly as it was originally imaged.
Regards . . .
I thought once more and it seems that if you initialize the disk in the desired scheme - MBR - and then restore it volume-by volume, it will preserve MBR scheme and will not change OS booting scheme.
If you recover disk as a whole, it will be converted as described in http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ABR11.5/index.html#1… . I will file a feature request, but it may be rejected due to a workaround above.
Hi Fedor
I’ve just spent a couple days working on this usability issue. Here’s a synopsis:
If we initialize a new disk as a GPT disk, then restore a backup that was previously made of a MBR disk, to that new disk, the new disk will not boot (even if during the restore setup we select to restore the MBR). I concur that this is by design to assist non-savvy users who typically are restoring a backup to the same machine and don’t know the difference between GPT/MBR.
The workaround for tech savvy users is to make sure that we initialize the new destination disk with the same type of partition table (ie. GPT or MBR) as the old source disk (and format it without assigning drive letter). We can do this easily in diskmgmt.msc for the new destination disk by deleting any existing partitions on that new disk, then right clicking on the leftmost content that says (e.g.) “Disk2”, and selecting either “Convert to GPT disk” or “Convert to MBR disk”. Btw, if you don't format without drive letter, when you try to select the disk as the destination disk in Acronis, it will appear greyed out and it will say "Copy Failed" if you try to select it. So make sure you do a quick format on the destination disk.
Additionally, I concur that if your Acronis backup has multiple partition tables of different types (e.g. the OS is GPT but other disks are MBR, or vice versa), initialize the new disk appropriately, and restore only the OS partition initially. After the OS partition has been restored, restore the other partitions.
Additionally, don’t forget that with Windows, you’ll need Vista+ and GPT to boot from disks greater than 2TB :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2581408 .
Regarding my OP, I did various test scenarios on a UEFI enabled motherboard, Windows 8.0 64bit on a GPT enabled OS partition, and Acronis Backup v11.5 installed. Yes, we can remove a good MBR disk from an otherwise dead machine (e.g. laptop), hot insert it into the Win8 box (if your disk controller or chipset supports hot plugging), image that old laptop disk while it's in the Win8 box and then remove it from the Win8 box, insert a new (or used) laptop disk in the Win8 box, initialize the partition table(s) as I described above (ie. either MBR or GPT, but MBR in this example), format the disk but do not assign a drive letter, restore the image and remove the new (or used) disk, install it to the laptop, and it will boot.
As long as the simple rule about initializing our destination disk appropriately as MBR or GPT (and formatting without assigning drive letter) *before* the restoration, I couldn't find any scenario where Acronis Backup v11.5 didn't work in my IT technical environment. This included restoring an existing one year old v10 tib file from an archive, to a used disk where I deleted off the partitions and re-initialized as MBR.
Regards,
Bret
P.S. I've put a link to this post over at https://forum.acronis.com/forum/43720 . They're having a similar issue with th4e "True Image" product. Maybe this post and it's threads will be applicable to them.
P.S. If anyone finds this helpful, would you mind giving me some “good to know”/“that’s common knowledge”/”boring”/etc feedback?