New hard drive not bootable

Somewhere in the instructions for the Acronis program should be a warning to shut down and disconnect the old hard drive before you attempt to boot from the new one.  That is why the drive is now showing up as "I".  You may still have a boot problem, but until you re-do the cloning process you won't be certain.  Make sure you look at all the information that appears on your display as you perform the operation so that if you find a box you need to check to make the drive bootable you will find it.

I tried shutting down the old boot disk drive in bios, but it didn't solve the problem. Does the old disk drive have to be physically disconnected for this to work? A little more information that might be helpful is this:

In disk management the old drive shows up as:   Partition  Basic  NTFS  Healthy (System)

In disk management the new drive shows up as: Partition  Basic  NTFS  Healthy (Active)

I don't know if this helps you understand the problem better or not.

Thanks for the advice.

Gary

Yes, the drive must be physically disconnected.  Shutting it off in BIOS only disables BIOS support for the drive, such as looking for boot information on the drive.  From the info you've written, your old drive is still the system drive as you can see from the note "Healthy (System)".  That is because that is the drive you are booting from.

In order to correct the problem now you will need to reclone.  I've seen articles that give procedures to change the drive letter, but this is problematic on a boot drive and not always successful given the amount of work you need to do.  I would think at this stage that recloning the drive would be the easiest thing to do, and once the cloning operation is complete, do not allow the computer to boot.  Instead, shut it down, physically unplug your original drive, and then plug the new drive in place of the old one.  Don't forget to turn off the port you had the cloned drive on as otherwise you may get some interesting messages at boot about not being able to find a drive on that port.  Once you have successfully booted the clone you can attach the old drive if you wish.

EDIT:  Note on first paragraph:  I obviously chose a poor example of what happens when you shut a port off in the BIOS with a drive still attached, since you say you have done that and the machine still says the old drive is the system drive.  Regardless, however, if you don't physically detach the drive from the main board you will wind up with interesting drive assignments.

So, if I don't reclone my new drive, and I do disable and disconnect the old drive, will the computer boot from the new drive but still the drive I even if I plug it into the port the old drive was in?

Gary

You need to understand that operating systems based on Windows NT keep track of the drive letter in the initial sectors of the drive.  The drive letter for a drive usually remains the same regardless of where you moved it and how the configuration changes.  If you disconnect the old drive at this point so that drive I is the only bootable device in the system, the computer should boot.  Your system drive, however, will remain drive I.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can cause annoyance down the road.  Many applications default to an installation on drive C, and if no such drive exists setup can't continue.

Something else that can give trouble on setting up a system drive is the presence of certain memory card readers that many computers have in a bay just under the optical drive.  I'm not sure how it affects a clone but I know that computers that have such a configuration assign drive letters to the readers.  The cable from the motherboard to the memory card readers must be disconnected during the installation to ensure that the system drive gets the letter C.

EDIT:  Actually this situation should not affect a clone provided the original drive has been removed.  When you boot the clone for the first time the system behaves exactly like it would if you still have the original drive .  This is because a clone copies all of the drive info, to include any serial number and drive letter assigned.  When you re-attach the old drive following that first boot of the clone, Windows assumes an error has been made on the re-attached drives and alters the serial number and drive letter accordingly.

It isn't possible to simply change the drive letter on a system drive once it has been used to boot the system.  When Windows initializes many entries in the registry carry the drive letter with them.  If these entries don't get changed, and they happen to have a path that includes the original drive letter, the path suddenly becomes non-existent when you change the drive letter.  Rather than try to track all of this down, believe me, it is far simpler to re-do the clone.

I'm one of those people with a card reader just under the CD drive. I'm going to give the reclone a try and let you know  how it turns out.

Thank you very, very much for all the information and help you've given me. You'd think I'd know all this stuff by now since I've been using computers since the 80s.

Gary

You're quite welcome.  Good luck to you.

I recloned the disk drive and shut down the computer when it was finished; then I disconnected the old drive and plugged the new drive into the old drives port and disabled the port that the new drive had been plugged into. It booted up and it worked perfectly. Thanks again for the help.

That is very good news.  Again, you're very welcome.