Cloning?

My wife has a computer that has two HD's and we would like to clone it to the second drive. What I would to know if I do this will it still boot to the same drive I cloned from when I restart or will it ask which drive do I want to boot from. The reason I want to do this is because if the C: drive goes bad I would like to move the cloned drive to the primary master to be up and running faster than doing the backup way. Will this work?

 

Hi you are seeking to do what I have already set up and works well.

to avoid the screen asking which drive to boot to - I have "hard wired my drives using the jumpers to set the primary and slave drives.

I regularly clone the primary (master) drive to the slave to keep an updated copy.

If the primary drive should fail one can reboot and catch the process with
F11 or your eqivalent which then offers the choice of which drive to boot from and one can select the slave drive which boots as though it were the primary drive. I do this regualrly to make sure it works. Acronis do not recommend you keep both drives connected! but I have had no problems in nearly 12 months.

I do however, reset the clone drive letter to differentiate from the master (after cloning they are both c drives) and also set a different desktop screen so I can tell which is which.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

 

Hello garyrh,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please note that Clone Disk Tool of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home transfers all the data of the source disk, including partitions, folders and files, to a newer disk, making it bootable if the original disk was bootable. The computer will boot operating system from the drive that set as first boot device in BIOS. Also as profitxchange mentioned we recommend you to unplug one of the hard drives right after the disk cloning process has been finished, since keeping both original and cloned hard drives connected might cause different boot or drive letter assignment problems. Thus, you can clone one hard drive to another and then if the original drive fails you will be able to change the drives and boot your system from the cloned drive.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to perform the clone procedure in Chapter 12. "Transferring the system to a new disk" in the Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

You can also give the drives unique volume names after cloning. Cloning also gives the cloned drive the name of the original so you have to change it after cloning.