Vista Clone will not boot

Hi,

Last night I cloned my Sata hard Drive (250 GB) to a larger one (400 GB) in Vista using the latest Acronis software. When I disconnect the original and reboot, the clone will advance to a screen stating "preparing your desktop". After a few minutes a plain blue screen appears and that is as far as it will go.
However, if I leave the original drive hooked up the cloned drive will boot and work perfectly.
I tried booting up the clone to the Vista Install DVD and clicking on the "Start Repair" without effect.
My goal is to have the clone drive work independently so I can then use the original as a data disk.

Any ideas will be appreciated!

 

Did you clone in Windows or from the TI CD?

Can you post a screenshot of what Disk Management shows for your drives?

On your original drive (the 250GB), what drive letter is assigned to the Vista partition? Is that partition the Active "Boot" partition?

 

http://[ATTACH]198118.vB[/ATTACH]

MudCrab

I cloned in Windows. The letter "I" is on the original (250 GB) hard drive.
The letter "C" has been assigned the new (400 GB) hard drive.

At the moment the "I" drive is indicated as active but after several boots this morning the "C" drive was indicated as the active drive. Even after the "C" drive was indicated as the active drive it would not boot without the "I" drive attached.

 

Disconnect the old drive and set the new drive as the boot drive in the BIOS. Boot to you Vista DVD and edit the BCD file as in Post #1 of this thread.

You may also need to clear out your MountedDevices entry in the registry to make sure C: gets reassigned to the new Vista boot partition. Currently, it's still booting from the old drive. The basic instructions for XP are here (you just need steps 3 to 13), but they're basically the same for Vista. Make sure to load the hive from the new drive.

 

MudCrab,

I followed the instructions until, "Make sure to load the hive from the new drive".

How is this done?

Thanks

 

If you're booting from the old drive (running Vista from it), then make sure you load the SYSTEM hive on the new drive (you'll have to browse to it). The new drive should be a different drive letter than C: since you're not booting from it. It's generally safer to boot into VistaPE because then you don't need to have both the old and new drives attached.

Before you do this, make sure Disk Management shows the OLD drive as the (Boot) and (System) drive.

 

MudCrab,

After browsing this forum it seems that my problem came from rebooting the newly installed clone with the original still connected. If I format the clone and redo the process ending by disconnecting the old hard drive before reboot should my problems be solved?

 

Possibly. And I say "possibly" because you have already let the original drive "see" the new one. It's worth a try, though.

I would boot the old drive with the new drive not connected. Do the BCD fix. Then shutdown, connect the new drive, boot to the TI CD and do the clone. Then remove the old drive, set the new drive to boot and see if it works.

If it doesn't work, you may need to remove the MountedDevices entries for the new drive from the old drive's registry before you clone.

 

Can you believe how much work there is to making a clone work? Is anyone at Acronis embarassed? Yes I probably spelled that wrong. But come on, we paid good money for this software and it does not work as implied.

 

Totally agree. I consider myself fairly computer literate and still I could not get it to work after reading all the threads, in the end I just gave up.

The advertising hype suggests that is easy, in reality it is not