Nightmare after cloning:Crosslinked Drives

Hi, After Cloning using True Image Home Ver 10.0 build 4871 from SATA to SATA drive I have a real nightmare. The cloned bootable drive is not recognized by Windows as the C: drive, in my case it is the G: drive! In fact, the only way I got it to boot was by accidentally leaving in an older version of my cloned drive and when my newly cloned drive boots, it recognizes that older cloned drive as the C: drive! What? Reads files off another drive as it boots! WINDOWS WILL NOT RECOGNIZE THE BOOTABLE DRIVE AS THE C: DRIVE! It is not a cable problem. I called a very knowledgeable friend of mine who has seen this problem and he tells me that when the newly cloned drive boots, THERE CANNOT BE ANOTHER ACTIVE HARD DRIVE IN THE SYSTEM and furthermore, drive letter assignment is somehow locked into the SID itself, and this CANNOT be fixed! However when the newly cloned drive boots, I see all sorts of messages from Acronis assigning it a drive letter! Can somebody please give me a heads up on this problem and how to avoid it or fix it, this is a true nightmare. I recloned the drive with NO OTHER drive in the system and it now boots fine as the C: drive, what is going on?

 

This is a confusing statement. Do you mean you just re-cloned the drive and it finally worked?

Either way for the majority of machines , in addition to following the software's instruction to the letter you must be ready to break off before mutual recognition of each drive (pull the plug if necessary after the clone is complete [sometimes the cloning software is too slow to do this as snafus do occasionally occur]).

Strangely, Windows does sometimes assigns a letter higher
than the CD drive letter forcing a re-cloning. Yes it is rare but it does happen ( at least in my experience).

Edit: slow typing kept me from posting prior to your new post https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t198557 . Using Usb drives have their experts (I am not one of them) on this forum: I suggest waiting for a response from one of them.

 

Yes, it worked, but I am still left with the OTHER botched bootable drive that WILL NOT boot with C: assignment.....would like to KEEP this drive as a backup........................how to do it.

 

This problem happens to me numerous times when cloning or imaging windows xp. Now everytime I restore with true image (I use true image 9.0) I always have a utility "paragon justboot corrector" always handy in case the restored drive doesn't boot. With the utility it takes me less than 5 minutes to change the drive letter on the non-booting hard drive and after I reboot the restored drive works.

I discovered one situation that will always cause the drive letters to change, when you try to restore a larger partition into a smaller partition that will almost always result in the drive letters changing. Drive letter changes are easy to fix with the right utility, using the windows repair console and entering dos commands to edit the registry is more complicated but it can be done that way also.

As long as you know how to change drive letters you will always be able to restore windows xp using true image, that's the only problem I ever encountered that prevented my restored drive from booting.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=174958

 

Matt:

To fix up your drive, do the following:

1. Boot your PC from the "botched" clone with the original source drive still installed in the PC.
2. Using regedit, navigate to the registry key HKEY_Local_Machine\System\Mounted Devices. Delete all of the entries in this key.
3. Shut down your PC. Remove the original source drive *(very important!)* and reboot from the clone.
4. When Windows starts up it will rebuild the list of mounted drives and reassign drive letters. You should end up with the Windows partition as the C: drive.

 

Mark's suggestion should work very nicely.

Some alternate ways of achieving success:
1. It helps if your drives have unique names so easily identified.
2. Clone from the Rescue CD.
3. Remove the original and install the clone BEFORE the first boot after
cloning.
Or;
4. Sometimes better to install the new unformatted drive in place of the original.
a. Install the original as the usb external drive (or another internal).
b. Boot from the Rescue CD
c. Clone from usb to internal.
d. Remove the usb drive before first bootup after cloning.

 

I used the very nice technique of using the Win98 SE boot disk (downloaded the ISO yet) to do a FDISK /MBR on my botched drive. Worked great, I recommend it highly, no registry to diddle with, this is a piece of cake.