Multiple Cloned OS Deleted Account On Another Drive

gizmo7 · 08-26-2012, 02:17 PM

Currently have three hard drives in my laptop.

Intel SSD, main drive used
Western Digital, "new" OS cloned drive
Seagate storage drive

The Seagate can be ignored for the most part. It simply sits there in one partition to soak up data as needed.

The Intel is my primary drive, but I am looking to move it to a new laptop in the next day or two so I cloned it to the Western Digital.

I then restarted and booted in the Western Digital, verifying as such via Disk Management Toolkit in Windows. From there I deleted my user account and started deleting sensitiive data so it could be zero'd in the next few days.

I decided to go back to the SSD to move some digital paperwork around and check emails [since I already deleted my user account and was using a new admin account from the Western Digital HDD Windows install].

When I boot back into the Intel SSD, I see it take me to the login page with my user name. Must have worked I think...I then type in my password, only to see it say "Preparing desktop..."

Hmmm, that's odd. Even more odd, it takes me to a fresh desktop with no software, no data, nothing...a totally new install even though I logged in with my user account picture, user name, and user password from before.

Looking around through the various drives, I see that my old user account data still exists on the Western Digital Drive. It is nowhere to be found, and only a public folder is found in its place, on the Intel SSD. Odd, so I reboot and run from the Western Digital drive thinking I can log in there and get my data. The Western Digital though does not allow me to log in to any account other than the new admin one I created to sell the laptop.

Rather frustrating more than anything....anyone know what happened? I somehow managed to boot into drive 2 (cloned from 1), and select delete user account, yet delete an account on drive 1.

corkyg · 08-26-2012, 05:52 PM

Not sure what you did or how you did it. What is your laptop setup? What sort of cloning did you do and how? I clone my laptop regularly (LenovoT510), but NEVER leave the cloned drive in the laptop with the original source drive.

By replacing my optical drive with an adapter that holds an additional SATA drive, I can have two internal drives, and if I boot from my Acronis prepared rescue Thumb Drive, I can clone from one to another. But, I have learned over the years that the safe way is to clone the priumary internal to an external drive. (Using eSATA)

When that is done, I remove the original source drive, and insert the new internal drive. Then I again boot with the Thumb Drive and this tiome, I clone from the external to the internal. When that is done, I disonnect the eSATA external and boot to the newly cloned internal. Never do I have two OS drives connected. That can get some laptops really screwed up.

What happens if you configure with just the original drives before you did whatever you did?

Concillian · 08-30-2012, 02:00 PM

This may be due to how modern OSes mount partitions. They give each partition a unique ID number, then mount by that ID number.

However, when you clone, you have an ID number that is no longer unique... so the operating system gets mighty confused. If both drives are active, you have no real way of knowing which partition ends up active and mounted.

The proper solution is to either clone and immediately disconnect one of the drives. Then either re-ID one of the partitions or keep the cloned drive as backup only.

Once the partitions again have unique IDs, there are no longer issues with writing / deleting from one and ending up accidentally writing / deleting from the other.

I had issues with this when I cloned my fileserver drive. It majorly confused me until I figured out what was going on. Especially since I had been using cloning as a stating point for a backup for years, then suddenly all kinds of whacky stuff was happening. That was linux, but I am pretty sure modern Windows OSes do the same kind of mounting. You can't just clone and keep both drives in your system. You need to change the ID of one of them, and the easiest way to know for sure which you're changing is to unplug the one you don't want to change.