You can clone basic disks from your operating system or from Acronis Bootable Media
This article applies to:
Acronis Disk Director 11 Home
Acronis Disk Director 11 Advanced
Introduction
Using Acronis Disk Director 11 you can clone basic MBR disks.
Source disk volumes can be cloned to the target disk "as is" or resized proportionally.
It is recommended not to format the source hard disk after cloning until you are sure that the cloned target disk boots fine.
(!) Only basic disks can be cloned with Acronis Disk Director 11:
Cloning dynamic disks is not supported:
(!) When cloning a basic disk, you have an option to copy disk NT signature. If you copy NT signature, you need to unplug one of the disks from the machine after cloning and before the first startup.
Solution
Cloning from Acronis Bootable Media
Create Acronis Bootable Media. See Acronis Disk Director 11: Creating Acronis Bootable Media ;
Boot from Acronis Bootable Media and select Acronis Disk Director 11 Home or Acronis Disk Director 11 Advanced:
Select the disk that you want to clone, right-click and select Clone basic disk in the menu (or in Operations list):
Select the target disk and click Next :
(!) Target disk can only be selected if it is big enough to hold all data from source disk.
Select to clone the disk As is or Use proportional volume resizing . Check the Copy NT signature box or leave it unchecked (applies only to Windows):
As is
Use proportional resizing
As is : the partitions on the target disk will of the exact same size as on the source disk. If there is any free space left on the target disk after cloning, it will be unallocated.Use proportional volume resizing : the cloned partitions will be automatically resized to fit the space of the target drive. Proportional resizing works both for smaller and larger target disks.
With the Copy NT signature option enabled, you will have the signature from the source disk copied to the target disk.
(!) With this option enabled, you will need to unplug one of the disks from the machine after cloning and before the first startup, otherwise the target disk will be unbootable. You cannot have two disks with the same NT signature on one machine.
With the Copy NT signature option disabled, you will keep the existing signature of the target disk.
(!) Two disks with the same NT signature cannot work under one operating system. If there are two disks with the same NT signature, at the startup the operating system will run from the first disk, discover the same signature on the second one, automatically generate a new unique NT signature and assign it to the second disk. As a result, all the volumes on the second disk will lose their letters, all paths will be invalid on the disk, and programs will not find their files. The operating system on the second disk will be unbootable.
Click Finish to close the wizard, then press Commit operations to start the cloning:
Cloning from Windows
Run Acronis Disk Director 11 Home if you have a Home version of the product, or run Acronis Disk Director 11 Advanced Management Console and connect to a remote or local Advanced Agent, if you have Acronis Disk Director 11 Advanced;
Select the disk that you want to clone, right-click and select Clone basic disk in the menu (or in Operations list):
Select the target disk and click Next :
(!) Target disk can only be selected if it is big enough to hold all data from source disk.
Select to clone the disk As is or Use proportional resizing :
As is
Use proportional resizing
As is cloning: the partitions on the target disk will of the exact same size as the were on the source disk. If there is any free space left on the target disk after cloning, it will be unallocated.Use proportional resizing (for supported file systems): the cloned partitions will be automatically resized to fit the space of the target drive. Proportional resizing works both for smaller and larger target disks.With the Copy NT signature option enabled, you will have the signature from the source disk copied to the target disk.
(!) With this option enabled, you will need to unplug one of the disks from the machine after cloning and before the first startup, otherwise the target disk will be unbootable. You cannot have two disks with the same NT signature on one machine.
With the Copy NT signature option disabled, you will keep the existing signature of the target disk.
(!) Two disks with the same NT signature cannot work under one operating system. If there are two disks with the same NT signature, at the startup the operating system will run from the first disk, discover the same signature on the second one, automatically generate a new unique NT signature and assign it to the second disk. As a result, all the volumes on the second disk will lose their letters, all paths will be invalid on the disk, and programs will not find their files. The operating system on the second disk will be unbootable.
Click Finish to close the wizard. Press Commit pending operations to start cloning.
More information
See also:
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