Sorry to say every version just gets worse and worse and has been since 2014, the last good version. We purchased over 300 licences here for Acronis 2019 and when the time came to get another 300 I can tell you we didn't go with Acronis and never will again. There is next to no use cases where it is required to covert from MBR to GPT.
If I am a user with limited knowledge, who recovers my own PC image back to another drive and it is already GPT then is would be recovered as GPT if Acronis recovered the image EXACTLY as backed up.
The majority of our systems still using Windows XP and Window 7 that can not be upgraded due to hardware and custom software installed and the amount of wasted time when images do not not boot as they as GPT is a waste of resources and time. Is it not the primary purpose of a backup program to recover EXACTLY what I have backed up and reimage that EXACT backup to the same or other medium ? Why is is so hard to recover the image I have made and keep it in the same format? It is quite simply mind blowing that any backup application would change or convert any backup to another format. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB.
Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph: Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there. ATI should be able to detect the boot method the the disk being imagined from and use it.Īlso something to note, you will most likely need to use Diskpart to delete all partitions created after the failed image, then you should be able re-initialize the drive to MBR.įrank, having both drives in an external caddy will still follow the BIOS mode used by the PC being used in the current implementation.Ĭloning laptop drives has other considerations here too due to the way Acronis tries to apply configuration changes to the BCD. Either way it seem like a simple fix in a version going forward. I'm unaware if Acronis only has this issue when using a computer using GPT and imaging a MBR or if the same disaster applies when booting from an MBR machine.
If you're using a GPT boot method on the computer you're imaging from or windows 10 1803+? that you need to be mindful when initializing the disk to choose MBR boot method otherwise you will use the default boot method of the computer you are using. ATI in turn, uses that boot type when imaging. I found that when you initialize your drive in windows 10 it will initialize to the same Boot type that is installed on the machine your using or at least the new build of windows 10 forces GPT. I was about 10 seconds away from finding a different Imaging solution when I realized this interesting factoid.
With regards to your customers still running XP, then unless these computers are permanently offline, these represent significant risk to business, as will be the case for Windows 7 after Microsoft drop all support for it early next year. I use an Orico dock I got from Amazon that does this (no longer shown as available - but lots of alternatives). If this is a repetitive business requirement to clone drives, then I would suggest investing in a hardware dual-dock clone solution where you could put the source & target drives in the dock, independent of needing to connect to a computer then perform a bit-for-bit clone where the format of the drive is not important. After all, I can't possibly be the only one with customers who still run XP, and there's quite a few. I understand MBR is older … but there's still plenty of need for cloning software to handle it easily. The machine that has ATI 2019 on it … its not ideal to keep rebooting and changing modes in bios. In my work environment and market, I have the need to swap drives and clone on the fly via usb port.