Failed to clone a Dell E521 Vista... Need Help

Hi,

I have a Dell E521 with Vista on it.
I'm trying to change the actual hard drive (Seagate 160gig) to a bigger one, a WD 320 gig. Both are internal SATA HDD

I clone the 160gig to the 320gig with Acronis True Image Home 10 by using the automatic cloning.

Once the cloning is finished, I remove the 160gig drive and leave the 320gig drive. The system restart but it cannot reboot ! it just loop by showing the Dell startup logo and a black screen. And it keeps looping.
EDIT: I cannot even see the Vista loading bar

It seems that the 320gig drive do not have a bootable partition .

But since I cloned it, it is supposed to be bit by bit identical to the 160gig drive, except the bigger size.


Someone have an idea of the problem

Thanks


ps: I known I can make an image of the 160gig active partition and dump it on the 320 gig but I'm just wondering why cloning is not working.

 

When you removed the 160GB, did you change the settings on the 320GB to be the same as the 160 had (jumpers, position on the cable, etc.).

Did you shut down and not allow Windows to start before you removed the 160GB drive?

 

Hi,

Both hard drive are SATA drive so no jumper is needed as far as i known.

Yes, just after cloning, I remove the 160gig drive and then I retart the system with only the 320gig drive


Thanks

 

I had very similar problem when I upgraded from a 40gb to 300gb on xp pro (TI9.0), where the new 300gb hard drive would go into a endless loop from windows startup to grey screen. I fixed it by changing the drive letter on the new hard drive back to "C" drive (somehow during the partition imaging I made it got changed to "F" drive). Once I changed the drive letter it booted right up. Though your OS is different, maybe this is something you need to check.

 

waltereo,

Although you shouldn't have to do this, plug the 320 GB HD into the SATA port on the motherboard that was previously occupied by the 160 GB HD. Does it make a difference?

 

SAme thing ...

 

As long as the BIOS recognizes the drive in the new location as the boot drive, that should be true. Since you swapped connectors without any benefit, that's not the problem.

Do you have a Windows Vista bootable installation DVD? If so, you could boot from the DVD and do a Repair. This fixed boot a problem on my system after restoring an image to a new drive. As a mater of fact, the DVD found the error automatically after I clicked on Repair and offered to fix it and then did so. After the repair, future images restored without boot problems.

If you can't do a repair, you might try making an image of the entire 160GB drive (all partitions selected for one backup) and restoring that to the new drive.

 

Thank You! I had the exact same problem today with my Inspiron 9400 E1705 making a clone (several partitions) from a 80gig to a 160gig drive. Clone looks like it worked fine but computer (bios screen) would just restart every 20 seconds on startup with the new drive.

Runing Vista DVD and repairing fixed it!

Acronis should make a note of this in their knowledge base. I bet many will run into this... Curious about what causes this, Vista tied to a hard drive id?

 

I don't think that's the reason. I repaired a Vista restore on one hard drive and then restored it to another hard drive and it booted normally.

I don't know why this happens, but in my case the hard drive had been used before Vista was installed, so Vista didn't create the drive from scratch. Therefore the problem may lie in the MBR or the partition table left over from the previous Win XP installations.

 

Ok,

Got it working now.
For a strange reason you cannot initiate the cloning when in Vista,
You have to reboot with Aronis TI rescue disk and then run the cloning from that rescue disk !!

So there's is something wrong when start the cloning from Vista. Even when vista reboot and then clone the disk, it is not exactly the same thing as reboot from the Rescue Disk and then clone

 

I had the same problem. I was trying to clone from Vista (x64). I ran it twice and both times it "finished" but the destination drive was empty. Then I found this post and tried it from the rescue disk and it worked. I still got the error that others described above, regarding booting problems, but after doing a repair from the installation disc, it worked fine! I just wish I didn't waste 3 hours trying to clone it before! The Acronis team needs to look into this.