Last August, I posted my adventures of trying to clone my undersized OS drive to a much larger hard drive using Acronis True Image Home 2011. It was enormously frustrating and job that should have taken an hour or two took days instead. Ultimately, it worked, but no thanks to the documentation provided by the fine folks who made Acronis True Image.
Time passed.
Ultimately my "new" (actually surplus drive I bought at work for $5.00) drive failed and I had to put the old OS drive back in my production PC.
More time passed.
The OS drive continued to accumulate system files and available space shrank to a dangerous minimum. I bought a couple of 1 TB drives from Dell and intended on transferring both my OS and data disks to them, insuring ample space for the foreseeable future.
I got lazy and waited a long time. But today's the day to make the move, clone both old drives to both new drives.
Cloning the OS drive was easier than I expected. I followed the old directions provided by Acronis and it worked like a charm. The PC booted to Windows 7 Professional from the new, cloned drive with no muss and no fuss. The cloning process just worked, and it worked pretty fast. I figured I might as well clone my data drive to a larger disk since I was already under the hood, so to speak.
I plugged the second 1 TB drive into the available SATA channel, booted into Windows, started Acronis, chose to clone disk 2 to disk 3 and performed the clone. The operation went exactly the same the second time as it did the first time.
Hooray.
I swapped the larger data drive for the smaller, booted and...
Yikes!
Can't find Bootmgr error.
What?
But the only thing I changed since my last successful boot is swapping a larger cloned drive for the smaller original data drive...Disk D.
I swapped the smaller drive D back in and booted. No dang problem whatsoever.
I left the "extra" larger data drive plugged in and opened Computer. It sees the C, D, and F drives. The D and F drives contain exactly the same files and directories. The only difference is that the F drive is bigger.
I did the clone operation over again just for giggles but the result was the same. When the smaller, original data drive is the D drive, the computer boots to the OS on the C drive. When I have the larger cloned data drive plugged in to the smaller drive's SATA channel (I swear, that's the only difference), nada tostada.
I am giving up my diagnostics at this point and throwing myself on the mercy of the Internet. What the heck went wrong.
There are numerous possibilities why this might not work. Two of the most likely are the following:
ReplyDelete* The Master Boot Record tries to boot from the other HDD instead of the actual system partition because of a misidentification
* Your Boot Manager is located on the Data Drive and by removing it it can't be found anymore.
You can try the following to analyze this further:
Unplug both old and new data drive and boot. If it boots then option 1 is most likely.
If it doesn't boot (meaning same error as before) then data contains the boot manager.
In either case you can open up a command window (cmd) and enter: bcdedit
This way you can check what is what and the related uuid's. Post the result of the command here with all 3 drives connected.
- Andreas
Thanks for the insights. I'll have to wait until I get home from work tonight to try this out. I'll post results when do.
ReplyDeleteActually, just for giggles, I typed "bcdedit" (as administrator) at the command prompt and got the result I was expecting. bootmgr is on the C drive:
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {721fabc1-edb4-11de-922e-cdab3013c52a}
displayorder {current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows 7
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {721fabc3-edb4-11de-922e-cdab3013c52a}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {721fabc1-edb4-11de-922e-cdab3013c52a}
nx OptIn
With all three drives plugged in (C: OS SATA 0, D: old data drive, SATA 1, F: new data drive, SATA 3) I ran the bcdedit command and got this result:
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {721fabc1-edb4-11de-922e-cdab3013c52a}
displayorder {current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows 7
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {721fabc3-edb4-11de-922e-cdab3013c52a}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {721fabc1-edb4-11de-922e-cdab3013c52a}
nx OptIn
C:\Windows\system32>
In other words, the exact same result as before.
I did notice something interesting when I went into the BIOS though.
Before changing anything, my computer is set to boot as follows:
1. Onboard or USB CD-ROM (which is probably the CD-DVD drive on SATA 2
2. ST1000xxxxx-9xxxxx (OS on SATA 0)
3. ST332xxxxxx (old data drive on SATA 1)
I don't know if this is important, but its set to RAID on with the other two options being RAID autodetect/AHCI and RAID autodetect/ATA.
I exchanged the old data drive and the new data drive and something very interesting happens. Boot sequence is:
1. Onboard or USB CD-ROM (which is probably the CD-DVD drive on SATA 2
2. ST1000xxxxx-9xxxxx (OS on SATA 0)
3. ST1000xxxxx-9xxxxx (new data drive on SATA 1)
When the computer is actually going through its startup routine, you can see that each drive has an identical part number and different serial numbers, but in the BIOS, all you can see is that both drives seem to be identified by their identical part number. It's as if the BIOS sees both drives as the same but only one of them has the bootmgr.
The boot sequence for this configuration looks like this:
1. Onboard or USB CD-ROM
2. ST1000xxxxx-9xxxxx
3. Onboard or USB CD-ROM
4. ST1000xxxxx-9xxxxx
When I put all three drives in, it gets even stranger. In the boot sequence is like this:
1. Onboard or USB CD-ROM
2. ST332xxxxxx (old data drive on SATA 1)
3. ST1000xxxxx-9xxxxx
4. Onboard or USB CD-ROM
5. ST1000xxxxx-9xxxxx
The computer really, really, really wants ST332xxxxx to be hooked up to SATA 1 and doesn't care what drives come after that.
Ideas?
Actually, I think I got the original boot sequence mixed up as I have it listed above. It's actually:
ReplyDelete1. Onboard or USB CD-ROM (which is probably the CD-DVD drive on SATA 2
2. ST332xxxxxx (old data drive on SATA 1)
3. ST1000xxxxx-9xxxxx (OS on SATA 0)
But that shouldn't matter since the bootmgr and boot loader are both on the C drive.
It happens often after cloning both drives have identical part numbers or serial numbers,
ReplyDeleteFIX: Open windows disk management and click on the SMALL red icon near the left / drive name