After clone, source drive not readable/visible

After cloning my source HD (2 partitions, 250gb), the source drive is not bootable, nor is it visible when booting off the cloned drive, or using the Bootable Rescue Disk.

I have cloned before using these 2 drives back and forth, usually once a month. I prefer to keep using the source drive and keep the clone as backup, but now cannot use the source.

The clone completed with no errors, and clone drive was removed before attempting to boot into XP.

Disk was scanned with chkdsk and seatools for errors, none found.

What now?

 

Maybe it is time to modify your strategy ... make an Image and restore the Image instead of doing a clone. This, of course requires a third drive to hold the Image. What version and build of True Image are you using?

 

True Image Home v 11, unsure of the build at the moment.

Anyway, acronis sees the source drive as 250gb of unallocated space. What did it to do my hd? It "seems" to have made a good clone, but made the original unreadable. Kind of defeats the purpose of a backup drive.

I like to have a clone drive so I can just connect it and start right back up, instead of backing up and restoring images. I have done this many times, this time seems to have got my puzzled tho.

Is there a way to recover this drive that is "unallocated" ?

 

The only thing to recover the original is to use the good clone and clone back to the original. But I would be wary of this seeing what happened before - you're darn lucky the clone worked. Until you can figure out a plausible reason that the original is now unallocated, play it safe and go the Image>Restore route.

 

Yea, I'm not very comfortable with trying to clone again. I tried disk recovery programs and the sort, none can find any partitions to restore on the drive. I wonder what happened to it... Clone seems to be working but who knows when I'll discover an error on it somewhere...

Ugh, and the reason I was doing this is to PREVENT this from happening.

 

Perhaps this might help in your making choices:

Clone or Restore using Resize comparison
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1299861&postcount=9

 

Whenever a drive shows up as (raw) or unallocated, that's usually a symptom of system files corruption. When I encounter this problem a chkdsk c: /f has always fix the problem and got the drive to boot.

All the data is still safe and sound on that drive, worst case scenario the free testdisk can recover all your valuable data, but the chkdsk should fix it.

This problem is usually cause by a abnormal shutdown of the computer. You can have 10 abnormal shutdowns with no problems, but eventually it will cause file corruption.

If that drive is slaved into the working xp, you can do a scandisk (with both boxes to fix errors checked) instead of a chkdsk (there both the same).

 

If the manual mode for cloning was selected one of the options is to delete the data on the source disk.

If this had been selected by mistake it would account for your situation.

I always use imaging and restores and would never use cloning as part of a backup strategy or hard drive upgrade.
Cloning exposes hard drives to risks that can be completely avoided by using the Image/Restore process. Combine this with restoring to a spare drive and you are really motoring.

Xpilot