Acronis Cloned Disk won't Boot - disk read / write error?

Acronis Cloned Disk won't Boot - disk read error?

I've disk cloned my current drive onto my older one, to try and make a back-up that I could just plug straight in and use should anything go wrong with my system. Everything seemed to copy ok but when I try to boot up with just the cloned drive in, the system gets as far as "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." then brings up an error message informing me that a "disk read error has occurred" and that I can press "Ctrl + Alt + Delete to restart". What's a disk read error?

If I boot up using my usual disk and with both drives in the system, the cloned drive looks fine from windows, with all the files and folders in place. I ran norton's disk doctor on the disk and it said it found problems with the 'security descriptors', whatever they are. I did have it on fix errors but the problems were still there when I checked a second time so it hadn't fixed them. What exactly are security descriptors and could they be something to do with why the disk won't boot?

Could the 'disk read error' possibly be a physical problem with the disk? I'm inclined to doubt it though, as I've only had the disk for a couple of months or so and not really used it all that much. Plus it seems to work fine when I access it as a second disk in windows. Started off my operating system on the older disk and managed to disk clone it fine to my current, larger, drive. Just can't seem to get it to clone back the other way now...

Thanks in advance for any suggestions / replies!

Glyn

 

Hello Glyn,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

The problem may result from the old disk quality. Could you please plug-in both your drives, boot into Windows and create Acronis Report in the way described at Acronis Help Post? After that please send the report to support@acronis.com along with the descirption of the problem. We will try to find the reason.

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman

 

Just e-mailed you in the system info file as requested. Don't think it is anything wrong with the drive though - I downloaded Samsung's hard disk testing utility, ran the full battery of test on it and it found no problems...

Glyn

 

Actually started afresh, formatted the drive and re-cloned everything. This time around it still doesn't boot, it gets as far as 'verifying dmi pool data' and freezes. No error message anymore though. Tried telling it to boot from the windows cd but it just gets as far as saying 'booting from cd' before freezing again...

Glyn

 

Hello Glyn,

If you cannot boot the computer with Windows Installation CD it cannot be connected with the disk and any software installed on the disk. I would recommend that you contact your hardware manufacturer (I suppose motherboard manufacturer should be the first one) for possible solution. The inability to boot from the normal CD (such as Windows Installation CD) is usually connected with motherboard issues.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Western Digital disk?

 

The computer does run fine with my normal drive though (I'm using it at the moment to type here), so my motherboard should be ok, shouldn't it? And I started off my system on the other drive, and it ran fine there. The combination of that drive + my motherboard has worked in the past.

Nope. My current drive is a 250Gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 and the drive I've been trying to clone to is a 160Gb Samsung Spinpoint P.

Could the cloned drive be getting confused because its been used to being accessed by a SATA connection (on the Seagate drive) while its now accessing via ATA (on the Samsung)? But then I've cloned from a SATA disk to ATA before and its sorted itself out so maybe not...

Glyn

 

Since you have problems with booting from your Windows CD, something is wrong with your hardware configuration. I am afraid you will have to do it the hard way:

Rip out your diskette drive, hard drives, etc, and get the Windows CD to boot. Then plug the diskette drive, hard disk1, hard disk2, etc back in, one at a time, and test the CD again. Somewhere along the line, I guess you will discover a jumper or cable problem.

 

Thinking about it I'm not sure this computer has ever booted straight from the cd. If you insert the windows CD with just a blank new hard disk in the computer, is it supposed to start off the installation process? As with mine it wouldn't and I had to use a friend's computer to download and make some pre-installation floppy disks that would need to be loaded in before the computer would talk to the CD properly and start the installation. That said though the CD drive (well actually a NEC DVD-RW if that’s relevant) runs fine from Windows, so wouldn't that rule out any kind of cable or jumper problem?

I'm still hoping we can find some way of successfully cloning the disk and am going to have another go at it tonight or tomorrow, following the suggestions made in the Acronis Support departments e-mail.

I guess even if it doesn't work out I could probably start off a fresh installation of windows on the disk and copy the important files across. Would be annoying having to do it that way and It'd take a good while reinstalling everything, but should work...

Glyn

 

Yep. Even with a working HD, it should boot of the CD (if you have your system configured correctly).

Things to check:

1. In the BIOS, check which devices it will try to boot from.
   
   My recommendations are: 1st) Diskette/USB-stick, 2nd) CD/DVD, 3rd) HDD.
   .
2. Check your cables.
   
   Sure you are not using a diskette cable for the DVD?
   
   Do you use Cable Select, or manual jumpering the devices for Master/Slave?
   
   Do you have any dangling cables, with the HD/DVD attached to the middle connector, and nothing at the end?