You can clone basic disks from your operating system or from Acronis Bootable Media
Introduction
Using Acronis Disk Director 12.5 you can clone only basic MBR disks. GPT disks cannot be cloned.
You cannot 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 cloning until you are sure that the cloned target disk boots fine.
(!) Only basic disks can be cloned with Acronis Disk Director 12.5:
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 12: Creating Acronis Bootable Media ;
Boot from Acronis Bootable Media and select Acronis Disk Director 12.5:
Select the disk you want to clone (you cannot clone a single partition, only cloning of an entire disk is possible), right-click and select Clone basic disk in the menu (or in the 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 12.5;
Select the disk you want to clone (you cannot clone a single partition, only cloning of an entire disk is possible), 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 Cloning Laptop Hard Disk .
