

I just switched over to the competitor software and its cloning it as I write this. Also using MBR disks as I almost always do for OS drives. So I do an image backup and still can't recover it to the smaller SSD. So then I thought, maybe I've only done this with image backup and restores. I swear I've done this many, many times and Acronis would just resize the partitions accordingly. Ran into this today trying to clone 48GB of data on a 500GB HDD to a 120GB SSD. ON newer windows 10 systems, F8 is not available by default, it may have to fail to boot 3 times in a row before it becomes an option to boot in recovery mode.

To get around that, I had to boot that particular system to safemode first (F8). In an old version of Acronis, when I cloned from SSD to NVME PCIE it would not boot either because the drive was "locked" by the OS due to hibernation (Windows fastboot).

Also, on some motherboards, you still have to go into the bios and re-pick the boot order because it may appear differently to the bios itself. Sometimes, clone will not boot if the old drive and new drive are both connected at the same time - the bios has to be able to identify each drive independently or it views them as the same and that can cause issues. Cleanup tool should not be an issue - i've run it several times in the past to help ensure I have a "fresh" install of Acronis when migrating to new "major" version which seemed necessary in some of the versions going from pre-2015 up to 2015 and newer versions.
