Disk Clone killed my source drive :-(

Greeting folks

In the middle of a disk clone operation from my C: boot drive to a clone target drive I had a boot failure.

Now I can't reboot from the original drive. I was using Acronis True Image 10.

Is there any way to recover my original boot drive?

Thanks
JohnG

 

I'm not sure what you mean by a boot failure since you said the cloning operation was in process. There is no rebooting except at the very beginning, if cloning from within Windows, and this does nothing to the original.

See if a Repair install of Windows will make your system whole again.

 

Yes, the boot failure happened during the initial reboot period after the 'synchronization'. This is a VERY no-bueno event.

I tried a windows repair route but didn't have the guts to reinstall the OS. I'm hoping there is another option.

Note: I had recently installed Bit Defender 2008. I have found some forum posts that indicate that Bit Defender and Acronis don't play nice. :-(

Regards
JohnG

 

are you using windows xp? , if you are, you might want to check your drive letters.
Maybe that got changed around during the initial reboot. It won't hurt to rule that out before you do any destructive repairs.

 

This is my boot drive that's honked up. Not sure how to check the drive letter. Maybe make a CD boot disk?

 

use the demo of "paragon justboot corrector" , download it unrar it and burn it to a bootcd. Now use that bootcd to bootup your computer.

In the first screen it'll list all the partitions on the hard drive, you will be interested in the one that says "system" , look at the drive letter. The drive letter needs to be the same as it was on your source drive. The demo reads the drive letters off of the registry, so it's very accurate. If you used the default installation of windows, it'll be c: for instance.

Don't use the true image boot cd to check drive letters, from my experiments, it's not accurate at verifying drive letters.

 

TI boot Cd doesn't attempt to verify drive letters at all. Give your partitions meaninful names, it sees them.

 

johnnymg,
Did you see my response to your earlier question?
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=197202#7

 

Hello all,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup software

At this stage Acronis True Image 11 Home should do nothing with the hard drive (and it should not modify source drive at all). Could you please Please create Acronis Report as it is described in Acronis Help Post and submit a request for technical support. Attach the collected report and information (exact error message that you see trying to boot into Windows) to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Michael Levchenko

 

Hi Micheal

I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS...................... it happened again!

This time the target drive was a SATA drive in an external enclosure (connected via Firewire 400). I used the "CD boot method" and did a clone from the internal C (boot drive) to the external drive.

******* After the clone process was completed I powered down the computer (as instructed) and after turning the power ON again the original boot drive is gortched! i.e NO BOOT

At least this time the target drive is usable! i.e. after swapping the target drive into an internal SATA connection the computer boots just fine! However, the original source drive shows up as "unallocated" in disk manager.

?? Ah................. what to do. I need a clone backup of the boot drive.

Note: I was successful in doing a prior clone using the boot CD method. What can be going on here? I'll open a service ticket.

Thanks
JohnG

 

Why not give TrueImage imaging a try. You should be able to restore a disk image onto a new disk successfully.