[SOLVED] My misadventures with Acronis True Image, dual booting and how I fixed it 10 hours later :P

[andrepartthree]

Here's some advice for people like me who are stupid so you don't have to spend 10 hours in a row wrestling with this the way I did 😛

I should start out by saying too... set a System Restore point on both Win 8 and Win 10 (or whatever two flavors of Windows you are running) , this is what saved me later on ... and while you're at it back up that registry for both Win 8 and Win 10 onto a usb thumb drive, that would have saved me a world of grief too

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...-your-pc-ac359b36-7015-4694-de9a-c5eac1ce9d9c

(in that link above scroll down to "create a restore point" .. note that you're looking for the word "system" instead of "system and maintenance" at one point in the instructions for Win 8 anyways)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/322756/how-to-back-up-and-restore-the-registry-in-windows

So I have Windows 8.1 on one SSD drive, Windows 10 on a second SSD drive, and I get the usual blue screen asking which Windows installation I want to run when I turn on my desktop computer. Windows 8.1 is the installation that Acronis True Image 2016 is installed on, so I use that for backups of both Win 8 and Win 10 onto yet another sata hard drive (that one isn't a SSD drive though).

I got myself a new , bigger (higher capacity, 1 TB) SSD drive (Crucial MX 500 model) for Christmas to put Win 10 on , so that would replace my old ssd drive Win 10 was on. I've been using Acronis True Image 2016 forever without a problem so I figured it would work without any issues here too.

I used the Acronis bootable media (check your Acronis program under tools it will walk you through how to make this), the one I burned onto a DVD (I think it fits onto a CD too, I realize most people would just boot from a usb drive nowadays instead and you can do that too) ...there's a guy named Steve on the Acornis forums who gives excellent advice as far as not doing this directly in Windows... I also followed his advice as far as creating a backup of Win 10 and then restoring the backup onto the new ssd drive as opposed to say a straightforward disk clone.

So the nightmares began... first when I tried booting into Win 10 on the new ssd drive I would get the blue screen of death " sorry there's a problem stopping Windows from loading" or something to that effect ... I wasted hours of time on dumb stupid pointless things before coming across another super helpful thread on these forums that said repairing the MBR would fix this (think it was the MBR) ... I went the overkill route and did the following ... rebooted Windows 8 into safe mode.. selected the troubleshooting option, then command prompt option, then performed the following four commands one by one

bootrec /fixmbr


bootrec /fixboot


bootrec /scanos


bootrec /rebuildbcd

I noticed with the last command , rebuildbcd (or maybe it was scanos? That 10 hours straight of panicked work is a nightmarish blur to be honest with you 😛 ) mentioned seeing the drive that Win 10 was installed on but not the other drive that Win 8 was installed on , I just said "yes" to the prompt anyways (choices were "Y" for yes or " N " for no or " A " for all) ...

Windows 8 Boot Issues? Try Fixing the Master Boot Record (MBR) or Boot Configuration Data (BCD)

Once you settle on the idea that you are not having a hardware problem and you are unable to boot up, your best bet is to try...

www.techspot.com

So that got Win 10 to boot normally again, yay ! But then nightmare number two happened.. sound vanished completely on both Win 10 and Win 8 installations despite the fact sound had been working properly prior to that (my online research showed cases where others have had similar problems with imaging software, knocks out the sound for some reason ) ...

https://superuser.com/questions/563357/error-code-32-after-swapping-out-a-hard-drive-on-windows-7

Checking device manager, I saw yellow exclamation points and the dreaded error 32 error when I clicked on the offending devices for more information... the high definition audio bus and high definition audio controller were no longer working. Strangely enough sound got knocked out on Win 8 too even though I hadn't cloned that at all to begin with.. not sure if one of the four commands I ran up there messed with the sound?

Now NORMALLY you can just uninstall the offending devices from device manager, reboot, Windows installs the devices again and presto problem is gone.. and that's what happened with Win 10.. Win 8 however stubbornly refused to cooperate despite me using this trick again and again.. finally my frantic online research turned up the possibility of a system restore point.. and I got SO lucky, turns out Win 8 had created a system restore point for me 10 days prior to my woes... used system restore to go back to that point and presto, sound again in Win 8... but an even better solution would have been for me to just back up my registry prior to the Acronis cloning to a new disk and then importing that registry again, or at least that's my belief.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-system-restore-a5ae3ed9-07c4-fd56-45ee-096777ecd14e

Happy to report that my new 1 TB ssd drive is running fine with Win 10 and Win 8 is running properly too, sound is working for both though of course I immediately created a backup of both Win 8 and Win 10 I can restore to after going through all this grief.

So what do I plan to do in the future? You can bet I'm setting a system restore AND backing up my registry too for both Win 8 and Win 10 in case this happens to be again.

I should point out this is the first time I've ever had this kind of issue with Acronis, my many times I have used Acronis True Imaging in the past it's been smooth as silk... but I should also point out this is the first time I've used Acronis in a dual boot setting, I stubbornly resisted Win 10 for the longest time 😛 then only reluctantly installed Win 10 on a different drive to future-proof my computer when I heard that Microsoft is officially ending support for Win 8 come January 2023 (which means no more security patches from Microsoft)

I know it's kind of strange to post a problem and my solution (even if it's not the best solution) in a single post but.. here's the thing.. even without being a member of the tom's hardware forums , threads like this will come up in a google search as I found out as I frantically searched for ways to solve my dilemma into the wee hours of the night.. it's my hope this thread will pop up during a similar search someone else might perform who runs into issues with Acronis in a dual-boot scenario.

 

[USAFRet]

2 drives, 2 OS, 1 boot menu (the blue menu).

yeah....putting ONE of those OS's on a different drive WILL be a problem.

Way to prevent that problem?
Install each OS on its own drive, with only that drive connected.
Each will be totally discreet from the other.
Cloning one of them to a new drive is then easy and painless.

 

[andrepartthree]

Well darn I should have subscribed to this thread so I would have seen the reply back in Dec 2020 instead of now a year later .. thanks for that USAFRet

Here's the sad thing though ... each hard drive was on it's own ssd drive 🙁 ... so Win 8 was on it's own SSD drive, Win 10 was on it's own separate ssd drive and I still ran into problems 🙁 ...

Having said that I have an update now due to brand new problems that left me sweating and terrified I had ruined everything and would have to reinstall Win 10 from scratch ..I got the " an operating system wasn't found" error when restoring from an Acronis True Image backup.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...-windows-2c149e3a-dc37-0322-4d79-336f3888906b

this link saved the day for me ... I should point out I disconnected the sata drives for everything except the Win 10 drive that was acting up (it was a similar situation to the first time but different PC, this time replacing a team group 240 GB ssd drive that Win 10 was installed on with a brand new Crucial MX500 500 gb ssd drive .. and yep in this case too Win 8 was living on it's own , different ssd drive)

Hopefully microsoft never takes that article down but if they do ...

(also I should point out this occurred with a " ASUS TUF GAMING B450M-PLUS II AM4 " motherboard too so who knows maybe the motherboard didn't like dual booting? ....first time using Acronis in a dual boot situation on that motherboard too )

Got the dreaded blue screen over and over again no matter how many times I followed the bootrec commands above... on a whim I tried "select a different operating system" and discovered I could boot into Win 8 okay, Win 10 was the problem (and yes I used the "verify" option on the Acronis backup for Win 10 after creating it ) ... I tried changing the boot order in BIOS to boot just from the ssd drive that had Win 10 on it

(I should point out too I used Acronis to "clone" my older, smaller 240 GB ssd drive to a bigger, 500 GB crucial 500 mx ssd drive, and yes I ran the backup from a bootable dvd and chose the "restore from backup" option that Acronis recommends on it's website )

and when I booted from Win 10 I noted the " an operating system wasn't found " error message on the screen.

Microsoft has a fix for this that shockingly works (given the hit and miss nature of Microsoft solutions that they post 😛 ) ... as I found out I can't copy and paste links here so I will repeat the steps mentioned in that article (if you google " an operating system wasn't found when booting windows support microsoft" I imagine the microsoft article should pop right up thought)

So hopefully you created a Windows 10 recovery DVD or usb drive because you're going to need it (if you didn't try to make one on someone else's PC and pray it works on your PC too )

Boot from said DVD or usb drive, select repair, then troubleshoot if memory serves me correctly

select command prompt

Find out whether your disk is set to GUID Partition Table (GPT) or Master Boot Record (MBR):

In the Command Prompt, type diskpart and press Enter.

Type list disk and press Enter.

Look for your disk and see if the GPT column has an asterisk (*) – this will indicate the disk is GPT. If no asterisk is found, then the disk is set as MBR.

Type exit and press Enter.

If the type is MBR:


From the Command Prompt, type dir a: and press Enter.

If drive A: is found and a directory is displayed, check for the \Windows folder in the directory. If it is there, that is the System Drive. Skip to step 2.

If the drive is not found or it doesn’t contain the \Windows folder, type dir b: and press Enter. Continue through the alphabet until the drive with the \Windows folder is found, but skip the X: drive. That will be the install files from the USB or DVD you are using. The most common location is the C: drive, so that example will be used in the rest of the article.

Once it is found, type: bcdboot C:\Windows /S C:

In this case, C is the drive where Windows folder was found. If the Windows folder is on a different drive, use that drive letter instead of “C” in the bcdboot command above.

The message Boot files successfully created must be shown before you can continue.

Type: diskpart and press Enter.

Type: list disk and press Enter.

Type: sel disk C and press Enter.

In this case, C is the drive where Windows folder was found. If the Windows folder is on a different drive, use that drive letter instead of “C” in the sel disk command above.

Type: list vol and press Enter.

Type: sel vol C and press Enter. (note.. in my case I had to type " sel vol 1 " , or in your case it might be " sel vol 2 " , whatever volume the C drive is on... as you can imagine if you have more than one bootable drive all the same size and diskpart isn't telling you which volume has which drive letter this could get dicey )

In this case, C is the drive where Windows folder was found. If the Windows folder is on a different drive, use that drive letter instead of “C” in the sel disk command above.

Type: active and press Enter.

You should get a confirmation that the volume has been successfully set as active. If you don’t get the confirmation, it means that either the disk is set to GPT (not MBR), or there is a problem with the disk. Make sure you are working with the right disk.

Type: exit and press Enter.

Reboot the PC

 

[TerryLaze]

The one thing you have to realize:
During installation of an OS the OS checks which drive has the boot files on it and adds an entry for the new OS you are installing, no matter if the new OS goes to a new separate drive or not.
So during installation you should only have the one drive that the new OS should go on connected to the system, that way all the boot files, including mbr, will go to that drive.
Then you can add the second OS to the boot menu, if you want to have a boot menu.

Ok, I lied, there is a second thing:
A clone and a image are not the same thing, an image will only backup the data but nothing drive specific, that's a good thing if you are going to a bigger drive that has different drive geometry.
A clone will do a 1 to 1 copy including all the drive specific info like mbr and geometry, doing a clone from a 250Gb to a 500Gb drive will leave the target as a 250Gb drive which you will then have to extend to use the whole size.

Every cloning/imaging software nowadays has an migration option, so does acronis.
These are custom made to be a cross between the two options, they only backup data but they do all the stuff you would have to do manually like copying your bcdstore/mbr extending the new drive to the whole capacity and so on.

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/true-image/features/data-migration/
"Back up everything: operating system, boot information, programs, and files
Easily change your computer’s drive from HDD to SSD"

 

[Pimpom]

TLDR (at least for now) but I got the gist. It's nice to see someone share their experience even if they've solved the problem and don't have to ask for help.
It makes me think that perhaps I should share my own experience in cloning a laptop OEM installation manually without using any cloning software.

 

[andrepartthree]

The one thing you have to realize:
During installation of an OS the OS checks which drive has the boot files on it and adds an entry for the new OS you are installing, no matter if the new OS goes to a new separate drive or not.
So during installation you should only have the one drive that the new OS should go on connected to the system, that way all the boot files, including mbr, will go to that drive.
Then you can add the second OS to the boot menu, if you want to have a boot menu.

Ok, I lied, there is a second thing:
A clone and a image are not the same thing, an image will only backup the data but nothing drive specific, that's a good thing if you are going to a bigger drive that has different drive geometry.
A clone will do a 1 to 1 copy including all the drive specific info like mbr and geometry, doing a clone from a 250Gb to a 500Gb drive will leave the target as a 250Gb drive which you will then have to extend to use the whole size.

Every cloning/imaging software nowadays has an migration option, so does acronis.
These are custom made to be a cross between the two options, they only backup data but they do all the stuff you would have to do manually like copying your bcdstore/mbr extending the new drive to the whole capacity and so on.

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/true-image/features/data-migration/
"Back up everything: operating system, boot information, programs, and files
Easily change your computer’s drive from HDD to SSD"

thanks TerryLaze .. I will definitely have to do that in the future, disconnect all hard drives except the one I'm doing a system restore from (I did do a system restore rather than cloning the acronis forum warns against just flat out doing a clone ) ...

The migration option.. I think that's for the subscription only model Acronis has going on right now with their newer version of Acronis? (not Acronis True Image that is) .. I'd rather be cheap and stick with the Acronis True Image I paid for even if it is obviously having some issues 😛 ...

I've heard rumors there are stores that sell a perpetual license of the newest version of Acronis despite Acronis itself not officially offering it anymore (I looked it up on the Acronis forums they are definitely NOT offering a "lifetime license" type thing anymore which has got some of the acronis community forum members upset ! ) ...

... but if I'm forced to abandon Acronis I might just go to Macrium Reflect Free which I've also heard good things about (in my case I don't worry about incremental or differential backups or anything like that.. I back up Windows every few months, save important files on a different hard drive , and restore windows from the Acronis backup if need be.. . which I know won't provide that much protection if some virus like say wannacry freezes up all the drives on my PC 🙁 .. I'm keeping Norton security and Windows security updates up to date on all the PC's and doing a backup to an external drive of Windows on my wife's laptop PC since she's the most vulnerable due to her lack of computer/internet experience but I need to stop being lazy and do that external backup thing for all the PC's in the house ..

TLDR (at least for now) but I got the gist. It's nice to see someone share their experience even if they've solved the problem and don't have to ask for help.
It makes me think that perhaps I should share my own experience in cloning a laptop OEM installation manually without using any cloning software.

Pimpom if you do, could you post the link here? (I'm subscribed to/ watching this thread now so I'll see any new posts on here hopefully) I'd really like to check it out

 

[Pimpom]

Pimpom if you do, could you post the link here? (I'm subscribed to/ watching this thread now so I'll see any new posts on here hopefully) I'd really like to check it out

OK, will do, once I've posted it.

 

[TerryLaze]

thanks TerryLaze .. I will definitely have to do that in the future, disconnect all hard drives except the one I'm doing a system restore from (I did do a system restore rather than cloning the acronis forum warns against just flat out doing a clone ) ...

The point is to do that while installing the OS so that all the boot files are on that drive.
Also if you have two OS' you can boot into the other one and run the free version of easybcd which is a much easier way of installing an mbr and a bcdstore (or add a boot menu item) to make a drive bootable.

The migration option.. I think that's for the subscription only model Acronis has going on right now with their newer version of Acronis? (not Acronis True Image that is) .. I'd rather be cheap and stick with the Acronis True Image I paid for even if it is obviously having some issues 😛 ...

Almost all ssd makers offer a free version of some migrate on their web sites.
For example Samsung Data Migration software, will migrate any disk but the target must be a samsung ssd.

Tool & Software Download | Samsung Semiconductor Global

Download various software related to your product, including Samsung Magician, designed for use with Samsung's memory products, and find related information.

www.samsung.com