Cannot clone Disk - Mouse and keyboard are dead
Apparantly this is a known issue. I cannot clone my hard disk. The process starts up and informs me that some of my removable media is slow to boot (I have none installed) a prompt appears asking me to say Yes, No or Cancel. I cannot select anything. The mouse is dead and the keyboard is dead. I tried changing the keyboard and mouse with corded devices. I ony have USB devices. My BIOS is set to support USB devices. What do I do now? Acronis True Image 2010 never had this problem on the same computer. I was forced to upgrade to 2016 because of Windows 10. Can anyone offer any suggestions?


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I ended up creating WINPE-based media with the Acronis plug-in. I managed to clone my disk but it took 15 hours. Strange but it seems to take a lot longer than Acronis True Image 2010. Both were 1TB disks, the one I was cloning only had 500 GB of data on it. After waiting 15 hours I received a wonderful error message when writing the MBR to the new disk. Unable to write sector xxxx Retry? Ignore? So much for that. I am now going to try clonezilla which is a bootable Linux ISO which also clones disks. At the end of the day I do not need anything fancy. I want a backup of my Hard disk in case of a failure because after 29 July I will not be able to upgrade my PC to Windows 10 again if the disk fails.
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Quentin, if the clone took over 15 hours and then gave you an error message about writing to the new disk, I would recommend running a CHKDSK /F /R against it to ensure that you don't have a failing disk or bad sectors, either of which could contribute to it taking much longer than usual.
With regard to Windows 10, once you have successfully activated it on your computer system, you can reinstall at any time because the activation is tied in to the hardware signature, no serial number is required etc.
The July 29th deadline for Windows 10 is for users on Windows 7 or 8.1 who otherwise qualify for the free upgrade but haven't done so. After the deadline they will have to pay the Microsoft price to upgrade to Windows 10.
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Hi Steve,
Thank you for that input. What actually got me motivated to back up my PC was because I lost the hard disk on my server. There is so much confusion regarding this Windows 10 upgrade I don't know what is plotting anymore. I contacted Microsoft Help Line and ended up in India. The gentleman I spoke to there told me that I had to re-install Windows 7 Professional again and then upgrade to Windows 10 all over. I had read that I could simply create Windows 10 installation disks and then re-install the software without entering a product code. Windows 10 would then sort itself out by my hardware signature. The agent at Microsoft told me this was not the case. My question simply put is that if I replace the hard disk, surely the hardware signature changes?
The cloning of my Desktop disk went OK - it just took a long time. Another question - is the SATA speed dictacted by the slowest drive in the PC? I have 5 disks in my desktop, some of which are SATA1.
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Hello Quentin,
I can confirm that you do not need to re-install an earlier version of Windows before upgrading again to Windows 10.
I have just done this over the last few days when repairing a laptop which originally came with Windows 7 and had been upgraded to Windows 10 and suffered a disk failure.
I was able to use the Microsoft Media Creation Tool to create a USB installation drive then boot from that and do a clean install of Windows 10 which was activated automatically without any issue on a brand new disk drive. The hardware signature is comprised mainly of the motherboard and CPU rather than peripherals that can change or be upgraded. Hard drive and memory will not cause the hardware signature to change.
Not sure about your SATA speed question, I guess it depends on which particular drives are involved when you are doing the clone? If you are cloning from a SATA 1 to a II or a III, then it will definitely be at the slower speed of the earliest drive but I would have thought that the bus would transfer data at the speed capable for the devices involved, not that of other slower devices that might be present (unless in a RAID set or similar).
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Hi Steve,
Thanks for the reply. You have cleared up a grey area for me. I will now replace the hard disk in the server and re-install Windows 10 - I will just skip the part where the Media Creation Tool prompts one for the key. I thought this was the case, however as mentioned Microsoft Support advised me otherwise! At least I can re-install the professional edition again.
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