[IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this

Eric, welcome to these User Forums.

I would recommend opening a New Topic for your problem with the M.2 SSD drive and provide us with more details of exactly what steps you have taken etc.  I am assuming that your original M.2 drive is still working if you put it back in your laptop?

Thank you Steve, I will open a new topic and yes the current 100GB drive is working fine, just out of space. I never took it out of the laptop, which after reading your comments and the Acronis manual more carefully ( what a dummy I am), is why I cannot access the M.2 drive anymore. The cloning operation went OK, however it made the new M.2 drive I had in the USB drive holder unreadable by Windows 10 as you have stated. I did go through the recovery steps as Acronis software stated to do and also backed up all data to another drive prior to cloning. I didn't really need that as the old drive works fine.

Just hoping to be able to salvage the drive. Maybe reformat it or something. Now it is unrecognizable by Windows.

Eric, check what is shown in Windows Disk Management for your USB connected drive?  One thing to be aware of is that the target drive is not normally given any drive letters for its partitions after cloning - this is to avoid conflicts etc.  It is possible that the cloning has been successful and that you would just need to swap over the drives to prove that the new drive works OK for booting into Windows.

Unfortunately it is not recognized. I have tried the USB drive (with SSD installed. It is in an Eluteng external housing) on several computers. After I completed the cloning I installed the supposedly correctly formatted M.2 SSD drive in the laptop and blue screen showed up stating it could not be started (as I recall). so I reinstalled the old SSD M.2 and it worked fine. It seems the cloning process destroyed all information on the disk making it unrecognizable.

Even the Acronis software cannot be started. Since I downloaded Acronis through a link Crucial provided, when I start Acronis it states that at least one Crucial SSD drive needs to be attached before it can be started.

Maybe I need to purchase a full version of Acronis?

Eric, the Crucial version of ATI is classed as being OEM and comes with limitations as you have mentioned.  If you have got this software installed and have a Crucial drive connected, then you should be able to create the bootable Acronis Rescue media from the application.

You would need to test that you can still see the M.2 SSD when booted from the Rescue Media as this is necessary in order to be able to restore your backup of the old drive to the new one when installed inside your laptop.

You will also need to verify that you boot the Rescue Media in the same BIOS mode as used by your Windows 10 OS - run the msinfo32 program to check this.  I would expect the BIOS mode to show as UEFI.

See KB  59877: Acronis True Image 2017: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media to see some screen images of what to look for.

Steve,

Thanks for your input so far. I am heading out for a while for Father's Day but will be back in a few hours. I appreciate you taking time this morning on your Father's Day.

I did create a bootable rescue media on a USB drive so I can try that when I get back. (as stated earlier original drive works fine) To be sure I understand your comments above: Acronis will not start because it thinks there is no Crucial drive attached. Should I install the new (unreadable) M.2 SSD back in the laptop and then boot from the recuse media? I think I would need to get into the BIOS and tell on the next reboot for the system to look for the bootable drive, right? Because it will not boot with the new SDD installed. It thinks there is no operating system.

Sorry if I am creating confusion as I am new to this but I have done quite a bit of research as best I can. I really just need to get the Crucial drive back to it's OEM state when I bought it because it was recognized in disk management when I started this process.

Be back in a few hours.

Eric, hope you have a good Father's Day.  Please open a New Topic where we can take this issue offline from this guidance topic, and I will be happy to try to help further.

Question for Steve. I have a Windows 10 Home 64 bit Desktop that has the latest full version of Acronis 2019 and it works great (I'd restored my PC twice last year with the 2017 version with no problems back when the early version "Creators Update" was causing many machines hell. My PC has the latest of the Windows updates now without any issues. I regularly do a full back up to a separate internal disk which is also copied to a USB drive. I run some very complex Audio software (Cakewalk Sonar, and hundreds of VST effects plug-ins). It took forever to install them on this about a year and a half ago when I got it. My aim is to get a laptop eventually that's powerful enough to match.

Then to basically do a clone of C drive and do a Universal Restore on that Laptop, overwriting the OEM Win 10 64 bit home version that will be on it once I bring it home from the store. If not mistaken this should go flawlessly, and then my laptop will boot with what is on my C: drive at my Desktop & maybe with some updating drivers minor stuff related to new hardware easily fixed. Will it recognize that OEM license somehow (from BIOS?) Or, will it say that I currently am running in the 30 day trial and to input that, then I put in that license number, and that's it, all finished?

Mark Downie wrote:

Question for Steve. I have a Windows 10 Home 64 bit Desktop, that has the very latest full version of Acronis 2019 and it works great. I'd restored my PC twice last year with the 2017 version of it, with no problems, back when the early version Creators Update was causing many machines hell. My PC has the latest of the Windows updates now, without any issues. I regularly do a full back up to a separate internal disk which is also copied to a USB drive. I run some really complex Audio software (Cakewalk Sonar and hundreds of VST effects plug-ins). It took forever to install them on this about a year and a half ago when I'd got that. My aim is to get a laptop eventually powerful enough to equal my desktop.

Then I would basically do a clone of C drive and do a Universal Restore on that Laptop overwriting the OEM Win 10 64 bit home version that will be on it once I bring it home from the store. If not mistaken this should go flawlessly, and then my laptop will boot with what is on my C: drive at my Desktop and maybe with some updating drivers minor stuff related to new hardware easily fixed. Will it recognize that OEM license somehow (from BIOS?) Or, will it say that I currently am running in the 30 day trial and to input that, then I put in that license number, and that's it, all finished? Please let me know if you've seen this done or if I am missing any essential steps in this process. Thanks for your help.

Mark, welcome to these User Forums.

Your questions here are more complex than the issues addressed in this older forum topic from 2017.  Please go to the Acronis True Image 2019 Forum and use the 'Create New Topic' button there and copy/paste your first post above into that, and we will endeavour to assist you with your new questions.

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2019-forum/clone-bet…

Done. Thanks for your help. 

Well, Steve, not to rain on your parade, but I am simply mystified as to much of the dialog in this conversation.  Exactly wtf is a disk clone supposed to do?

Example 1: user has a running system, wants to upgrade to a larger drive.  Supposing he has a C: drive and is going to clone it to an external usb and swap it back in, how is the C drive ever going to get corrupted?  Sure, he selects the external drive and writes over the existing C drive, I see that.  But the original post of this thread implies that "something bad might happen" which implies Acronis doing some shady stuff.  Going from C to something external should NEVER render the existing system unbootable.

Example 2: Acronis is running on my machine.  I have an external drive that I want to clone to a new external drive.   I'm not sure why this should be so hard to do and why the he$$ Acronis makes the description of the operation so damned complicated.

The topic really needs to be edited for clarity and conciseness.  Frankly, the application desperately needs polishing. At the moment, my clone operation has started, but the app reports "not responding" because it's stalled in an I/O thread.  Jeesh.  Yes acronis, I'll be happy to beta test your next release.....

Charles, this is a topic that was written back in January 2017 in response to multiple users coming to the forums having blindly started clone operations, often using OEM versions of ATI which told them to just go do it without any warning of any consequences, and who were then facing the challenge of needing to recover from errors or mistakes made etc.

Disk cloning can be performed successfully if adequate precautions are taken, and with more recent versions of ATI (2018 & 2019) this is now possible using the same VSS snapshot process as used for creating backups from an active Windows OS.

There is no 'shady stuff' being done by Acronis when cloning - simply issues that can arise if users do not understand the process, i.e. not to try to boot into Windows with 2 drives reporting the identical drive signature etc.

If you have a specific issue with using Cloning for your external drives, then please use the option to 'Create new topic' and give us more information to work with to understand your issue and try to help you to resolve it.

With regards to "The topic really needs to be edited for clarity and conciseness." only the Acronis Forum Moderator can do any such editing and I doubt that this would happen as this is what it is, a series of individual discussions on different aspects of cloning and the advice offered.

If you have ATI 2019 then you could open a Support Case directly with Acronis for issues you encounter with cloning.  If you have an earlier version, then you can use their Pay Per Incident service for support, or else can always use the Feedback tool in the ATI GUI to make comments to Acronis.

I attempted disk cloning twice, and destroyed my C drive each time.  I chalked the first failure up to me, but the second, Acronis.  I cannot help but wonder why such a horrifically poor utility would be allowed to remain available.

I'm also left with the same feeling, although cloning my OS drive worked fine.  What failed was taking 2 other drives and adding them to the system, and cloning one to the other.  The data is all there still, so not "destroyed", but neither is now bootable.  Seems recoverable, but really, why would it ever perform any kind of write operation on a source disk for cloning?

Simon, please continue the conversation on this subject in the new topic you opened for this. Cloned working disk, now neither will boot

This is an excellent article.  I read this before I ever  used cloning....so I have NEVER USED CLONING!

My question is does it matter if  you are restoring to a SSD but the  source backup was an HDD?  I have twice ran into odd issues when  using BU and Restore to move to an SSD.  Before I do my next one, i want to  make sure  that there isn't something else I need to know.

Thanks

Chuck, there shouldn't be any issues with restoring to a SSD ... but... this depends on how you are doing the restore (or clone), i.e. is the SSD connected directly as a replacement for the original HDD, using the same physical location / SATA port / cables etc.

There can be issues if the target drive for a restore or clone is connected using a different controller to that used by the original source drive - this has been reported recently after users found that Acronis invoked Universal Restore at the end of the restore / clone process which then injected or changed drivers because of the difference detected!

Again, this shouldn't be an issue if connecting the SSD via an external USB connection, as many users including myself have done successfully, but it really depends on how the external adapter is implemented!