Fortigurn
Member
This story is far longer than it should be. I'll try to keep it short.
1. I have two 750GB drives. I wanted to clone one entire drive onto the other, Drive 0 to Drive 1. The source drive consisted of Vista (C), and three data partitions. I had done this once before completely successfully.
2. This time the cloning program I used (Drive Clone 3), informed me that it needed to reboot to perform the clone, since there was a locked file on a source drive. This was annoying, but I let it ride.
3. Rebooting my computer, I found to my astonishment that my two drives had swapped drive letters. My previous boot drive (WD 750GB AKS), was now D drive, and my former D drive (WD 750GB ACS), was now my C drive.
4. I wanted to reassign C drive to my AKS, it being the faster drive. I thought this would be a fairly simple operation using Acronis Disc Director. I told it to switch the drive letter of C to N, then the drive letter of D to C, and rebooted.
5. Acronis carried out the changes (allegedly), and my rig rebooted. Nothing had changed. My ACS was still assigned C, my AKS still assigned D.
6. Well, I thought, they both have the same data on them, this shouldn't be a problem. I shutdown, ensured that the AKS was the first boot drive in the BIOS, and rebooted. Bad luck, my ACS was still assigned C, and my ACS was the drive which booted.
7. I shutdown my computer, and pulled out the ACS. This time I was sure I would boot straight into the AKS, and all would be good. Alas no. I managed to get as far as the Windows login screen, and logged in. After a brief 'Welcome' message, I was informed 'Preparing your desktop'. I knew what was to come, having seen this ominous message in a previous install. Sure enough, after about 5 minutes of waiting it threw me into a pale blue desktop entirely devoid of anything but a mouse cursor. The only thing I can do in this state is access the task manager and reboot.
8. I shut down, threw the ACS back in, and booted up. Try as I might, I could only boot successfully into the ACS Vista install. Repeated attempts to repair the AKS install using the Vista repair kit on the original Vista DVD made no difference. Searching through the options of the EasyBCD and following the instructions likewise made no difference.
9. Somewhere along the line, my ACS Vista install decided to do the same as my AKS Vista install. Now it doesn't matter what I try to boot into, I still get the annoying 'Preparing your desktop' message for 5 minutes, before the Blue Screen of Banal and I can do nothing but shutdown or reboot.
Suggestions?
1. I have two 750GB drives. I wanted to clone one entire drive onto the other, Drive 0 to Drive 1. The source drive consisted of Vista (C), and three data partitions. I had done this once before completely successfully.
2. This time the cloning program I used (Drive Clone 3), informed me that it needed to reboot to perform the clone, since there was a locked file on a source drive. This was annoying, but I let it ride.
3. Rebooting my computer, I found to my astonishment that my two drives had swapped drive letters. My previous boot drive (WD 750GB AKS), was now D drive, and my former D drive (WD 750GB ACS), was now my C drive.
4. I wanted to reassign C drive to my AKS, it being the faster drive. I thought this would be a fairly simple operation using Acronis Disc Director. I told it to switch the drive letter of C to N, then the drive letter of D to C, and rebooted.
5. Acronis carried out the changes (allegedly), and my rig rebooted. Nothing had changed. My ACS was still assigned C, my AKS still assigned D.
6. Well, I thought, they both have the same data on them, this shouldn't be a problem. I shutdown, ensured that the AKS was the first boot drive in the BIOS, and rebooted. Bad luck, my ACS was still assigned C, and my ACS was the drive which booted.
7. I shutdown my computer, and pulled out the ACS. This time I was sure I would boot straight into the AKS, and all would be good. Alas no. I managed to get as far as the Windows login screen, and logged in. After a brief 'Welcome' message, I was informed 'Preparing your desktop'. I knew what was to come, having seen this ominous message in a previous install. Sure enough, after about 5 minutes of waiting it threw me into a pale blue desktop entirely devoid of anything but a mouse cursor. The only thing I can do in this state is access the task manager and reboot.
8. I shut down, threw the ACS back in, and booted up. Try as I might, I could only boot successfully into the ACS Vista install. Repeated attempts to repair the AKS install using the Vista repair kit on the original Vista DVD made no difference. Searching through the options of the EasyBCD and following the instructions likewise made no difference.
9. Somewhere along the line, my ACS Vista install decided to do the same as my AKS Vista install. Now it doesn't matter what I try to boot into, I still get the annoying 'Preparing your desktop' message for 5 minutes, before the Blue Screen of Banal and I can do nothing but shutdown or reboot.
Suggestions?