Migrate via USB drive only works one way

I experienced a lot of frustation trying to migrate an Windows XP (SP2) NTFS laptop drive to another drive in a USB enclosure. I imagined all kinds of problems that were causing it but nothing worked. Everytime I completed the migration and put the drive into my laptop the laptop would get past the BIOS boot screen and just hang with a black screen. I tried a Windows XP recovery console 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr' on the drive and it still wouldn't boot - but I could see all the files and mounted as a second drive on a running machine it all checked out fine (I did a full chkdsk on it to make sure).

In the end I discoverd if I put the new drive into the laptop and the old one in my USB enclosure and migrated the USB drive to the new one in the laptop then it worked just fine. The machine would boot right up with no problems. Is this a known problem for Migrate Easy or is there some Windows XP step needed to make a drive in the first instance work?

I'm using the October '04 version of MigrateEasy 6.0 that you currently have on your update downloads page.

 

Hello WhoGrant,

Thank you for using Acronis Migrate Easy (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/).

Please accept our apologies for your inconvenience.

This problem is definitely connected with the hardware. Probably this problem occurs because of the different chipsets used to connect your internal and external USB hard drives to the laptop. The thing is that Windows will not boot in the first case (when you migrate it from drive with internal connection to the new drive connected via USB) if the USB chipset uses another (different from the internal chipset) scheme to write data on the drive. However that will not prevent you from reading information from the USB drive. And consequently you have managed to get a bootable drive in the second case when the information has been written to your new hard drive using the internal chipset.

However, we are really glad to hear that finally you have done what you want.

Hopefully informed you well.

Thank you.

--
Andrew Berezovsky