Cloning HD now fails

[theukmoog]

I bought Acronis v9 in October 2005 and my backup regime has been to do complete disk clones around once a month.

This has worked perfectly for 11 months.

I went to clone at the weekend and it fails with an "Operation Cancelled" error message just after the "Locking Partition C" message appears. PC then reboots but fails to boot up and I end up cycling the power after a minute or two.

I downloaded the latest version, 3677, and get the same result.

I've read some similar threads and so downloaded the latest drivers and first tried with logging disabled, same results, and then enabled logging, with the same results, too... log file attached, touch wood.

I've installed nothing new in the month since my last successful clone.

PC is an AMD X2/4400 running WinXP Pro.
I have Norton SystemWorks 2005 installed but have done since the PC was built.
Only other software of note is Microsoft Windows Defender.

WinXP, Defender and SystemWorks are all set to auto-update and so are, presumably, running current versions.

Help! I currently have no backup so am looking for a quick solution to this problem or will have to find new backup software!

[foghorne]

-{ Quote: "I bought Acronis v9 in October 2005 and my backup regime has been to do complete disk clones around once a month.

This has worked perfectly for 11 months.

I went to clone at the weekend and it fails with an "Operation Cancelled" error message just after the "Locking Partition C" message appears. PC then reboots but fails to boot up and I end up cycling the power after a minute or two.

I downloaded the latest version, 3677, and get the same result.

I've read some similar threads and so downloaded the latest drivers and first tried with logging disabled, same results, and then enabled logging, with the same results, too... log file attached, touch wood.

I've installed nothing new in the month since my last successful clone.

PC is an AMD X2/4400 running WinXP Pro.
I have Norton SystemWorks 2005 installed but have done since the PC was built.
Only other software of note is Microsoft Windows Defender.

WinXP, Defender and SystemWorks are all set to auto-update and so are, presumably, running current versions.

Help! I currently have no backup so am looking for a quick solution to this problem or will have to find new backup software!" }-

Hi theukmoog,

since fault finding could eventually have an effect on your data, I would suggest that you make a conventional backup and write it to another drive or to DVD before you do anything else.

Did you properly uninstall ATI before you reinstalled it.

Have you changed any hardware or changed your configuration/partitions etc since it last worked.

Have you considered trying BartPE with the ATI plugin.

Is there a reason why you are backing up using the clone function rather than the backup function

F.

[Ralphie]

Are you cloning from within windows or using the bootable Rescue CD?

[theukmoog]

-{ Quote: "I would suggest that you make a conventional backup and write it to another drive or to DVD before you do anything else." }-I will manually backup the most important data to another drive but am still looking for a cloning fix!

-{ Quote: "Did you properly uninstall ATI before you reinstalled it." }-Yep.

-{ Quote: "Have you changed any hardware or changed your configuration/partitions etc since it last worked." }-Nope.

-{ Quote: "Have you considered trying BartPE with the ATI plugin." }-No idea what BartPE is... can't see it listed under Acronis.

-{ Quote: "Is there a reason why you are backing up using the clone function rather than the backup function" }-For years now I've been cloning as my backup regime as it allows me to recover from HD failure in a matter of hours, rather than the days/weeks it can take me to install windows, my applications and games etc. You forget all the little day-to-day applications until you need them!

I started off with Ghost but when I moved to backing up to an external USB, Ghost failed and I moved to Drive Image (who were subsequently bought by Symantec and the technology was merged into Ghost, I believe).

Drive Image worked until I built this machine last year which has 2x80Gb drives for a 160Gb nvidia raid primary drive. Acronis has been backing that up to a 160Gb IDE drive perfectly for 11 months but something has broken Acronis in the last month or so.

Today I created the Rescue CD which, from the latest release, can see my 160Gb RAID drive and claims to back it up but hits 100% and then gives me a "Clone finished with errors" message but no further information, the log is empty and the destination drive has nothing on it.

So, right now, Acronis is getting a big fat thumbs down from me, which is a shame as it has been working perfectly for 11 months!

[Brian K]

theukmoog,

I'm sure you will overcome this problem. Many of us have been saying not to use clones as backup but to use images. Your experience is another reason not to use clones as now you have no backup. But at least you still have your main HDs so you can make an image. And with images you can keep several generations, they can be stored anywhere a file can be stored, even on DVDs if you desire and they are smaller than clones as they don't duplicate free space.

Is there a semantic issue? I assume by "clone" you mean a copy of the HD partitions.

[Ralphie]

Yes, I think the OP is using the word "clone" in a generic sense.

[theukmoog]

-{ Quote: "Is there a semantic issue? I assume by "clone" you mean a copy of the HD partitions." }-Both semantic and quoting what Acronis TrueImage calls it.

[Brian K]

Well that's definitely what I understand to be a clone but the term is ambiguous at times.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.htm#14

Here Dan discusses the difference between a clone and an image. But he has also written this..

-{ Quote: " Pleonasm said:
"So, the scope of “cloning” is an entire physical hard disk whereas the scope of imaging is a partition – right?"

No, you're talking apples and oranges here. A clone is an exact duplicate of the original, regardless of whether it's a partition or a whole disk. An image is a file whose contents can be used to create a clone, but it is, itself, not a clone. You can have an image of a partition or a whole disk, but in neither case would you have a clone--you would have an image, which you could use to create a clone of the original partition or a clone of the original disk. The scope of either--image or clone--could be one partition, multiple partitions, or whole disk.

El_P. talks of:
"the final results of performing either (1) a "disk-to-disk" cloning operation of said disk; or (2) a complete "disk-to-image" backup/"image-to-disk" restore cycle would be the same."

That's true--the result of both is a clone. But I would emphasize that scenario (2) is actually two separate steps, and it's only 'cloning' if both are performed. And that's not always the case. It's common to make image files that never get restored. That's not cloning, that's imaging. Put imaging together with restoring, and now you've got cloning. Whether it's back to the same hard disk or a new hard disk is irrelevant--apples and oranges.

Nightowl said:
"When you use 'cloning software' to create an 'image file'--'disk-to-image' for example--you are introducing an intermediate step--a 'file' creation--but it is 'cloning' just the same--just not re-creating the HDD structure directly onto another HDD."

I have to disagree a bit with this. The intermediate step is itself an end result--the image. But it's not 'cloning' until you take the separate step of restoring the image back to a hard disk or partition.

As for the distinction of a 'copy' vs. a 'clone', things get fuzzy. By a rigorous definition, a clone is an exact duplicate, indistinguishable from the original. Usually, however, an exact duplicate is not what we want; we want a copy that works like the original. So, if we alter the clone slightly to make it work--such as tweaking the registry, or boot.ini--or resize the partition, do we not have a clone? If files end up on the destination partition in slightly different sectors, do we not have a clone? Technically, that's true ... but it works just like the original. In the common vernacular, a very close copy that works like the original is typically still accepted as a clone. As the original and clone become less and less identical, at some point we have to stop calling it a clone and refer to it as a copy--but exactly where to draw that line is a bit subjective. " }-

We should always ask people what they mean by "clone" as it might be different from our own understanding.

Are you able to make a backup image with TI?

[theukmoog]

Glad that I went to the effort of creating and posting a log... really bowled over with the level of official support here :(

All I wanted to continue to do is monthly system clones so that, if my current drives fail, I can restore my system in a matter of hours to the point of the last clone. This is my backup regime and I'm not about to change it because the backup software that worked for 11 months now craps out on me!

Thanks for all the other posters... I'm resolving the problem by purchasing new HDs, dropping the RAID and using any.other.cloning.product that works... goodbye Acronis!

I find it highly amusing that, since my original post, I've been junk mailed an offer to upgrade to v10... the cynic inside me wonders about the timing involved!