Windows ME Clone probs...

[theWFox]

Hi - I just succesfully cloned my XP system drive to a RAID array, -easy! So I made the mistake of volunteering to clone my neighbours old ME system drive to a new 300 gig Seagat drive she had bought..... Big Mistake!

I set the new drive up as a slave and plufgged it in and installed the demo copy of TrueImage on her pc - chose clone automatic, and away it went (Ok it could only see 128 Gigs on her new hard disk, but she wasnt too bothered). It rebooted to start copying, and just stayed black (after a brief flash of some text that was too quick to read). This happpebd on a number of occasions, so i started the pc in Win safe mode and rooted around to see what the program had modified. I spotted an acronis shell entry in system.ini, so I deleted this and restarted.... the PC booted up seemingly OK, but then came up with loads of error messages- failing to load various drivers and implying that it was out of memory....

I tried to restore the last windows settings but this failed....

I couldnt find anything useful telling me what was going on using google so gave up for the evening, but I cant just leave it cause, nothing seems to work properly now ..... help! (I can see my weekend receeding rapidly in front of me :-( when will I learn not to offer to help my neighbours?)

Can anyone give me any hints as to what Acronis has done, and what I might be able to do to restore her system to it's former health? (I'm not gonna even ask how to get the disk clone to work! - but if I get the system back to normal, that might be something I'll consider later).

Thanks in advance for your help folks....

[Bruce Mahnke]

I cannot help with cloning a Windows Me system as I have no experience with that. It appears that you may have more that one issue here. You will need to get the 300 GB drive properly recognized instead of being limited by the 128 GB barrier. You might want to look at the Seagate web site (Technical support) for some suggestions. In addition to the 127/128 GB limitation there is also one at 137 GB. Here's a link:

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/

[Brian K]

theWFox,

I don't know what went wrong either. When I used WinME I was quite fond of the System Restore function. That was before I discovered imaging. It's worth a try.

[theWFox]

Hi Thanks for replying....
Surely it doesnt matter that ME doesnt support bigger than 128 Megs (and i thought it might cause problems cloning if I had to install some weird drivers and funny partitions, since I thought acronis cleaned any partitions on the destination disk before cloning anyway)?

I would be happy just to get her system back working again to be honest... clues on what I need to undo that acronis has done in preparation for the clone operation would be real useful....

Thanks, again

[theWFox]

... and i tried to do a system restore to the only restore point that showed up (when I started in safe mode), and it told me it couldnt do it.... :-(

[theWFox]

Phew - got it back to normal - looks like acronis just disabled virtual memory - have put it back on, and it's boooting normally - hoorah...

Still would like advice on how to clone this disk tho (although this time I am gonna proceed more carefully - system restore points, backup and boot disk first) - any ideas why I am getting a black sceen and lockup on the reboot? not the nice blue screen with progress i got on my xp macnhine?

Cheers,