I'm afraid...

[TwoRails]

Remember that old movie line, "be afraid" ?? Well, I'm afraid to install my new hard drive.

I picked up a spare HD and cloned my primary IDE boot drive, and logical drives, over to the new SATA drive. That was so I could rearrange the "old" drive. I cloned back the new drive back to the old drive, but Acronis apparently set XP Pro SP1 to *assume* I wanted the new drive as the boot drive. I do Not want this. On each reboot, after multiple clones, Acronis gives a message it's synchronizing the drive with Windows.

If I clone the new back to the old, and pull the new one, then I boot normally. So here is the big problem: Every time I reconnect the new drive, Windows boot from that and Not from the old drive as it should.

What's worse is that if I remove the new drive, the old drive will no longer boot up. The ONLY way to get it to boot is re-clone the new drive back to the old drive, and pull the new drive.

So is this Windows causing this strange and unwanted behaviour? Or is it Acronis?

I'd sure hate to boot to floppy, use Gdisk (a Ghost utility) to clear and reformat the new drive, only to find out that now I can't boot to any drive!! I already have at least 8 - 10 hours in cloning and re-cloning and this is more than frustrating.

To add insult to injury, I tried using Acronis to restore a backup copy of my old boot drive ('C' only) and it checked fine when I did the backup. But, on restore, Acronis tells me it's a bad copy. So, I can't trust it at this point.

How do I fix this??!!

TIA

TR

[glc]

You need to do all this by booting with the Acronis CD, not in Windows.

[TwoRails]

I did.

[TwoRails]

Any ideas if this this a Windows issue or and Acronis one? My main concern is if I wipe the drive with Gdisk or the like, Windows will still think it should boot from it.

[glc]

I'm a bit confused. Do you want it to boot from the old drive or the new drive?

[TwoRails]

Sorry this is so long, but I really don't know how to make it any shorter.

I want to boot from the old (original) drive, Not the new one. The new one is for storage only.

I'll run the system for a while (rebooting and such) with the old drive and it works fine; I'm running off it now. But each time I connected the new drive, it now becomes my boot drive, overriding the old drive with no intervention from me, and the drive letters are wiped out.

The thing that has me bothered is that Acronis gives a message that it is "synchronizing the drive with Windows." More specifically, I don't know how Window's is finding this drive (new) and making it the boot drive. So, if I wipe the drive, I am highly concerned that Windows will still want to boot from it (from info gathered by Acronis, and still on the old drive), but now not find a valid drive .

The reason that this a big concern is that after it boots from the New drive, the Old drive will No longer boot!! I have to reclone the old drive from the new drive to get the old drive to work again. If the new drive is wiped, I will no longer have anything to clone back from.

Thanks,

TR

[glc]

Are you saying that if you disconnect the new drive, it boots fine from the old drive and the old drive has everything you need for now? If so, uninstall Acronis, then shut down and disconnect the old drive, hook up the new drive, boot from floppy or CD, and zero fill the new drive. This will take care of any issues with its boot sector.

[TwoRails]

Originally Posted by glc Are you saying that if you disconnect the new drive, it boots fine from the old drive and the old drive has everything you need for now? ...

In a word, no.

If I clone back the new drive to the old drive, then pull the new drive, only then will the old drive boot normal.

If I were to install the new drive tonight, I would now boot to the new drive and I lose my old drive. (The files are there (old drive) and can be seen in Windows Explorer. I also loose the drive letters.)

If I then pull the new drive and try to again boot from the old drive, I get as far as the screen just before the logon screen appears, so Windows at least thought about loading. It goes no further no matter how long you let it sit

If I clone the new drive back to the old drive, and then pull the new drive, only then will the old boot like it should and did before I cloned it to the new drive.

... If so, uninstall Acronis, then shut down and disconnect the old drive, hook up the new drive, boot from floppy or CD, and zero fill the new drive. This will take care of any issues with its boot sector.

Do you think that making the new drive not an Active drive, that it would work?

PS: Also, Acronis now has a new build out: 3677. I used the retail build of 2323.

[Underhanded]

Though you seem to know plenty already, I have to suggest the basic stuffs.
Check jumper settings on the new drive? make sure its set to slave?
Checked BIOS settings? Most bios have an option to let you choose which hard drive you want to boot from, you could probably set it to the "old" drive there.

Edit: Perhaps clone the "old" drive to the new drive so it boots normally from the old drive, then force the new drive to be slave in the BIOS? Do you need both drives to be bootable? If the "new" drive is for storage purposes only, you seem to be putting yourself through a great deal of trouble to make it bootable. Or perhaps I'm not fully understanding what you are trying to do.

[glc]

I want to boot from the old (original) drive, Not the new one. The new one is for storage only.

Okay.

If I clone back the new drive to the old drive, then pull the new drive, only then will the old drive boot normal.

Okay.

Originally Posted by glc Are you saying that if you disconnect the new drive, it boots fine from the old drive and the old drive has everything you need for now?

In a word, no.

Will you please be consistent?

[Underhanded]

Originally Posted by glc Okay. Okay. Will you please be consistent?

I think what he means by no is that he has to clone the drive back before it boots normally. If he installs the new HDD, he has to clone back to get the old one to work again.
.... but meh. I'm unfamiliar with this, acronis, so I'll leave you two to ...that..

[TwoRails]

Originally Posted by Underhanded Though you seem to know plenty already, I have to suggest the basic stuffs. Check jumper settings on the new drive? make sure its set to slave? Checked BIOS settings? Most bios have an option to let you choose which hard drive you want to boot from, you could probably set it to the "old" drive there. Edit: Perhaps clone the "old" drive to the new drive so it boots normally from the old drive, then force the new drive to be slave in the BIOS? Do you need both drives to be bootable? If the "new" drive is for storage purposes only, you seem to be putting yourself through a great deal of trouble to make it bootable. Or perhaps I'm not fully understanding what you are trying to do.

Thanks for the post, Underhanded. Yes, I've been cloning and installing drives for a whole lot of years and this is the first time I've run into such a problem.

1) The new drive is SATA, so no jumpers to set. No need to change the old drive from it's location of Primary master.

2) Yes, the BIOS boot order remains the same: Floppy, Primary IDE HD, and the Optical drive. Also, my BIOS has an option to set the order on which the hard drives are recognized, and they are still in order: IDE channels, then SATAs.

3) No, I have not tried disconnecting the old drive to see if the new drive will still boot, but that's an interesting idea just for the experiment of it all.

4) No, I wasn't trying to make the new drive bootable. What I did was clone the old drive to the new one for A) a temporary backup, and B) rearrange the old drive. The old drive had 4 logical drives on it and I wanted to remove one. That operation was successful. I then cloned the old drive from the new drive, which had only the 3 logical drives (I'm including the active partition in the '3' logical drives for simplicity). The clone itself worked just fine....

Originally Posted by Underhanded I think what he means by no is that he has to clone the drive back before it boots normally. If he installs the new HDD, he has to clone back to get the old one to work again....

Yes, that is correct!

[TwoRails]

Originally Posted by glc Are you saying that if you disconnect the new drive, it boots fine from the old drive...

Originally Posted by TwoRails In a word, no. ...

Originally Posted by glc Will you please be consistent?

I am consistent, it's just that this is a convoluted problem:

1) If I clone the old drive to the new drive, and pull the new drive, Yes the old drive will boot.

2) If I reconnect the new drive, then the system will now boot to the new drive, NOT the old drive.

3) If I now pull the new drive, NO it will no longer boot to the old drive. I must re-clone the new drive back to the old drive for the old drive to boot normally.

I've done this *over* four times now and the results are consistent.

Yes... very strange and I've never seen anything like this before. I've never had this problem with many years / versions of Ghost, and even longer with HD manufacturer's utilities.

[thefultonhow]

Maybe I'm missing something... Why are you cloning the old drive to the new drive if the new drive is ony for storage and you want to boot off the old one?

[glc]

If I clone the old drive to the new drive, and pull the new drive, Yes the old drive will boot.

Fine. This is what you want, right? The old drive boots, and has all the stuff you need, right?

If this is a *YES* -

DISCONNECT the old drive, CONNECT the new drive, BOOT with a zero filling utility on CD or floppy and zero fill the new drive!

Then reconnect the old drive, set the bios to boot from IDE before SATA, fire it up, and partition/format the new drive for storage.

Or am I STILL missing something?

[TwoRails]

Originally Posted by thefultonhow Maybe I'm missing something... Why are you cloning the old drive to the new drive if the new drive is ony for storage and you want to boot off the old one?

No, didn't miss much as I didn't go into detail on the "why"above to help not muddle the problem.

The short version is I wanted to reorganize all my physical and logical drives on my system, and maybe remove one of my physical drives. Cloning to the new drive allowed me to shuffle some logical drives around, and remove one from the original 'old' drive. I also wanted to try out Acronis and put it thru it's paces.

The long version:

Even though I have "tons" of drive space, I don't have sufficient space to move things around and reorganize as I'd like. Part of the reorganizing I want to do is get rid of some logical drives and free up some drive letters. Going back in history a little, I've always sliced up my drives to reduce cluster sized, thus getting a lot more usable space out of the drives. Naturally, with NTFS and it's 4KB cluster size, this is not an issue anymore. I do still prefer to slice up drives for organization, faster defrag, and the like. I would also like to remove one physical drive (my smallest: 120GB) and use it in one of my other systems.

I'm using "logical drive" to include Active and Extended partitions in this thread. My 'old' boot drive has 4 logical drives one of which is my 'G' drive. This drive is now full and contains games, email, browser caches, temp directories, my download directories, and more. One main goal was / is to move this logical drive to the first logical drive on the 'new' unit. So, removing 'G' from the old boot drive was my big test for Acronis.

I shuffled some stuff around on other drives to make room for 'G' on a different physical drive, freeing up one logical drive. I then used Acronis to backup 'G' and then restore it to the now empty logical drive I just freed up. Unlike Ghost, which can clone a partition to a partition, I found no method to do this with Acronis, so the extra steps of backing up and restoring were necessary.

This worked and now 'G' is on a different physical drive. (This is the *only* Acronis procedure I've used that has worked without problem so far!). What I did next was to delete the old 'G' logical drive from the old boot drive. I did this in Windows' Disk Management. That left the old drive with 3 logical drives, which is the number I want on the drive.

Then, I used Acronis to clone the old drive to the new drive. As I wanted, only the 3 logical drives were cloned. So far so good. I then re-cloned from the new drive back to the old drive, expanding the logical drives to fill the extra space on the drive created by removing the 4th logical drive (where 'G' was).

Again, so far so good, or at least I thought, but this is where the 'problem' started. As mentioned above, things are OK at first when I pulled the new drive, but once I reconnect the new drive, I lose my original boot drive that we've been referring to as the 'old' drive.

If you've made it this far, I owe you a cold beer! -- Now, here is why I am so concerned. I have, too many times to count, cloned boot drives to a second drive using Ghost and similar utilities, and then have both drive coexist in the same system as they should. So why does Acronis switch over to the new drive each time?? What I am concerned about is that there is something installed on the old drive to tell the system to boot from the new drive. Remember 'EZ Drive' that you could install on systems that didn't support large drives? It would allow you to use the full size of the large drive. Both Maxtor and WD, and others, had such utilities. So is there some special boot loader or the like that Acronis install??

I am not trusting Acronis at this point due to this and other problems I've had with it not mentioned here. I tried to do a backup and restore of just the 'C' drive on the old drive, but it failed. I'll try again with the latest build. I feel I have to have at least one valid backup before I attempt any kind of fix or wipe on the new drive. If I still have a problem, and no back up / clone on the new drive to redo the old drive, then I'm sunk.

I'm also going to do a Ghost of the old drive, but if Acronis has some sort of boot loader installed, the problem will persist.

[TwoRails]

Originally Posted by glc Fine. This is what you want, right? The old drive boots, and has all the stuff you need, right? If this is a *YES* - DISCONNECT the old drive, CONNECT the new drive, BOOT with a zero filling utility on CD or floppy and zero fill the new drive! Then reconnect the old drive, set the bios to boot from IDE before SATA, fire it up, and partition/format the new drive for storage. Or am I STILL missing something?

I don't think you're missing anything, and yes I agree that it *should be* that simple. See the literal screen shot of Acronis' boot message below. That is what is making me worry. I am worried that Acronis stuck some kind of boot loader, or the like, on the new and or the old drive. Either way, if something was installed on either one, it's on both now due to all the back and forth cloning.

PS: The silver lining in this dark cloud is I had a mysterious lockup yesterday. On a reboot.... well, it wouldn't. Trying safe mode, the system was hanging at "mup.sys" Thankfully, the clone on the new drive was still around, and I yet again re-cloned it back to the old drive. That fixed whatever happened.

[TwoRails]

Don't know what happened to the screen shot... sorry:

PS: this is after cloning, a shutdown, disconnect of the drive, then first boot.

[glc]

That's a display that you get when you clone in Windows. I've never seen that after cloning from a CD boot.

[TwoRails]

Interesting. All cloning was done by booting to the CD using build 2323 in Safe mode. Full mode would simply run for hours, long after HD light activity ended. I tried the new build, 3677, yesterday but it wouldn't even get to the first GUI screen (tried only once, though).