Acronis True Image Home 2011: Cloning Basic Disks

You can clone basic disks from your operating system or from Acronis Bootable Media

This article applies to:

Acronis True Image Home 2011

Introduction

Using Acronis True Image Home 2011 you can clone basic MBR disks.

(!) Acronis True Image Home 2011 does not allow to clone a single partition, only cloning of an entire disk is possible.

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 the cloning until you are sure that the cloned target disk boots fine.

It is possible to clone a larger disk to a smaller one, provided that the smaller hard disk has enough capacity to fit the contents of the larger disk.

(!) Only basic disks can be cloned with Acronis True Image Home 2011.

You can use Windows Disk Management to see if you have basic or dynamic disks:

Hit Start-Run and type in diskmgmt.msc
If it shows Basic, then you can do the cloning:
If it shows Dynamic, then cloning is not possible:

(!) Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack does not allow to clone dynamic disks as well. As a workaround, you can create a backup of the source dynamic disk and restore it to the new disk using Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack.

Solution

If you are going to do system disk cloning, it recommended to do it from Acronis Bootable Media.

Cloning from Acronis Bootable Media

Create Acronis Bootable Media. See Acronis True Image Home 2011: Creating Acronis Bootable Media;
Boot your computer from Acronis Bootable Media and select Tools&Utilities -> Clone disk:
Select the Automatic mode to have your old disk's partitions automatically and proportionally resized to fit the new disk:
Select your old hard disk as the source disk and click Next:
Select the new hard disk as the destination disk and click Next:
If the destination disk is partitioned, click OK to allow the product to erase all data from the destination disk (required to do the cloning):
Review the operation on the Summary window and click Proceed to start the cloning:
When the cloning completes, shut down the system and remove one of the hard drives.

Cloning from Windows

Run Acronis True Image Home 2011 and go to Tools&Utilities -> Clone disk:
Select the Automatic mode to have your old disk's partitions automatically and proportionally resized to fit the new disk:
Select your old hard disk as the source disk and click Next:
Select the new hard disk as the destination disk and click Next:
If the destination disk is partitioned, click OK to allow the product to erase all data from the destination disk (required to do the cloning):
Review the operation on the Summary window and click Proceed to start the cloning:
If you are cloning a disk with currently active operating system, the program will ask for a reboot. Press Reboot to continue cloning:

(!) If you press Cancel, the operation will be aborted.
When the cloning completes, you will be offered to press any key to shut down the computer. Shut down the system and remove one of the hard drives:

Knowledge Base

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