True Image Disk Clone works sometimes...

I'm in the same boat. I tried just about everything. The Acronis guys had me do all sorts of stuff, re-install, create a cd (many cds...), install snapapi, and so on, and so on, and so on, all leading nowhere. That's what happens when you try cook-book fixes without understanding the problem. The basic problem is that Acronis disk clone software has a bug.

I have been thinking about this problem quite a bit. Here's my assessment of what I think is happening: When Acronis attempts to clone the drive, I hear the drive clicking and buzzing away - clearly the software is busy. I suspect Acronis is collecting all sorts of data and doing some kind of check before it begins writing onto the target disk. For whatever reason, Acronis software gets confused and skips the writing procedure. Because Acronis sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, that suggests (to me) that the data on the source disk has changed and that sometimes Acronis likes it and other times does not. When it does not, it does not write onto the target disk.

Here's my logic: I know the drives in perfect shape (they are brand new Western Digital WD3200SBs, I have checked them with chkdsk /r/f many times) and I know my Windows XP installation checks out (I did sfc /scannow, etc, etc, etc... and many other system checks). I have had exactly the same problem with my old drives: a 120MB Western Digital and a 120GB Maxtor over the past 2 years. Over the past two years, I have religiously maintained my system, and have incorporated all of Microsofts updates. I do not use "funny" software - it's all bought/paid for, and in the case of Spybot, I sent in a donation. This problem has been random over two years. So it's not the drives or the "system". The only other variable left is the data on the disk.

My conclusion: It's got to be the data on the hard drive that Acronis is reading which screws up Acronis. For some reason, when that data is "just right", Acronis starts to work and I am able to do disk cloning. Other times, the source disk data screws up Acronis. I have no idea what data Acronis needs or what it does with it, but the behavioral evidence points to Acronis getting screwed up when it reads the source disk data just prior to writing to the target disk.

At this point, we all need Acronis to chime in....

Cheers,
John.

 

Anyone else with similar problems?

Cheers,
Johnny.

 

yes...I came here tonight when I tried my first clone and I can't get it to work. I'm installing a new bigger/better hard drive. Old and new drive are sata. I've tried it with two different destinations and get the same result...it says it did it, but since it completes in seconds I know that's not the case.

I can't get clone to work on my amd x2 4800 machine. I'm using TI 9 home latest build.

 

Sounds exactly like my problem. Acronis disk clone seems to have a bug and I'm willing to bet it's exactly what I have described. Wish I could help you, I'm afraid that the only ones who can help are the Acronis folks.

I am hoping if there are enough customers who have experienced this problem, Acronis might get motivated to solve this. If there is anyone else, please come forward!

Thanks,
Johnny.

 

I have TI 9.0 and a new Gateway computer with 3 hard drives.

2 are in a raid 1 configuration while disk #3 is separate.

I tried cloning from disk1 to disk3 and am having the same issues as has been reported here.

I suspect it is a TI bug.

George


- Your request for names of alternative software has been deleted. Please pose that particular question in the <Software & Services Forum>. - Menorcaman

 

unfortunately, acronis is one of the best, when it works... I'll be lookin into alternatives my self.

Cheers,
John.

 

True Image Disk Clone Doesn't Work, Part 2

Dear All,

I an effort to get Acronis to solve the problem of why Disk Clone does not work (see my similar thread on this), I have called Acronis.

I spoke with a very pleasant person and was assured that some one (from engineering) would get back to me. I explained there are others (this forum) who have the same problem and that the problem appears to be a systemic Acronis software problem (that has been around since at least version eight). I will keep you posted with what happens next.

If anyone else is experiencing similar disk cloning problems, or has a solution, would love to hear from you.

Thanks,
Johnny.

 

Latest: got some help from Acronis today. I was emailed the download coordinates for the latest "snapapi.exe" which are supposed to be the latest drivers. For some reason, they were not part of build 3854. We created a new bootable rescue CD which worked fine. With it, I was able to do a disk clone (that involved booting from bootable rescue CD that we just created). Everything worked just fine, the cloned disk contained all the new info.

I tried repeating disk clone, but from the windows environment. It did not work, exactly the same problem as reported. At least we have half of the solution.

For those of you in the same jam as I, you can try the following:
1. get the very latest version 9, build 3854,
2. get the latest snapapi.exe from http://download.acronis.com/sl/hokdtwuuampuamveekfn/support/SnapAPI_s_e.exe and run it (you may have to get the IP address from Acronis, this one was emailed to me),
3. create a bootable rescue cd,
4. your rescue cd should help, it worked for me, but I can't quarantee it.

Disk Clone from Windows does not work (yet).

many thanks to Jeff from Acronis,
Cheers,
Johnny.

 

I've got a slightly different set of symptoms, but the result is the same: it won't clone. What happens for me (I'm just trying to replace some older lower capacity disks with newer, bigger ones). The clone of the old G: drive to the new one worked all right (I don't recall having any problems with it at all). It came up and recognized the new disk as G: and the old drive was unused as far as Windows was concerned. The new drive is called Disk 2 by TI.

Now, trying to clone the boot disk to the old G: drive (which I've low-level reformatted and checked with SpinRite), TI comes up and stalls in the "Analyzing Partition" phase. It complains about unreadable sectors on Disk 2--when it does anything other than just hang. Since that disk isn't one I wanted to clone, I'm not sure what's going on. I click on the Clone Disk option and it says "Processing please wait: Analyzing partitions" and it will apparently sit there indefinitely. I can't tell if it's making any progress or not.

What I've found is that I can terminate the Clone setup--remember I haven't even chosen the disk to clone at this point (via the Task Manager) when it gets stalled and sometimes it gets farther on a restart/retry. Like the one prior poster, I also did an uninstall and reinstall; didn't help. There are some instructions related to a manual uninstall that I haven't bothered to try yet. I did find the setting to ignore unreadable sectors and checked that--it hasn't made any difference.

Now on the last couple of runs, it's actually allowed me to set up the cloning and I've agreed to the requested reboot. But, when it gets to the reboot point, it's now been stuck on "Analyzing Partitions" at 25% for more than an hour. At first I was hitting Ignore each time it ran into a problem (it's complaining about sectors on that Disk 2--which was new so I'm surprised there's a problem, but why is it looking at this disk anyway when I'm cloning Disk 1 to Disk 4?). After hitting Ignore about 90 times, I decided that given that it was taking 10 seconds or so to give the next error (and it was reporting a different sector number each time) that maybe it actually was doing something (just taking forever) and pressed "Ignore All".... That was half an hour ago--still stuck at 25% "Analyzing Partions"

The disk it's unhappy about has passed a chkdsk without problems.... But why is it even looking at that disk anyway??

I thought earlier that since the clone process wasn't working that I'd just take an image of the boot disk and save it and then load that onto the other disk. That attempt had the same problem--I never got to the point of choosing the disk because it was "Processing please wait" indefinitely.

It's occurred to me that I suppose I could take out the disk that it's complaining about (even though that will render the server's main purpose--email--useless because the data and program are on that disk, it's not doing me any good the way it is now either!).... I know I tried different combinations of disks in and not in over the last several days with no success. I guess that's a next step...

At any rate, I bought TI back in 2004 to move stuff from one disk to another and it worked great (saved an image and loaded it back onto the new drive without any problems). The machine in question is still running Win 2K, but that's supposed to be all right as per Acronis's info. The current software, which I upgraded to strikes me as a piece of junk so far.

John C

 

I'm trying to clone a 50gb hdd to a 160gb hdd. It seems that it gets to step 3 and takes a long time before anything happens. Can anybody tell me how long this operation should take?

 

In my experience, if you don't see some progress indication within 5 minutes or so, it's not looking good.

John

 

Taking out the offending Disk 2 allowed the cloning to proceed. With the box shut down, I took out the old boot drive, swapped the new one into the same place it had been and put the Disk 2 back in. I had to reassign it the right drive letter, but with that done, I'm back in business.

I'm going to try the rescue CD option in a separate box for the next round.

 

Dear All,

It could also be that some of your installed software is crashing Acronis. Try creating a bootable rescue CD, reboot from that, and then try the disk cloning procedure. Hopefully, that will work. However, I agree that would be half of a fix.

Cheers,
Johnny.

 

As for the timing of the copy operations, I have Acronis working on a 2.8GHZ desktop, with an 100GB ATA 5400rpm being copied to a 160GB SATA 7200rpm drive. Both are internal drives. There is only about 20gB of actual data.

Here are my timings for the CLONE, operation 3:

Analyzing partitions - less than 5 seconds
Locking partitions - less than 5 seconds
Checking partitions - about 1 minute
Copying partition - 10 minutes, 37 seconds

By the way, I had an old laptop with a USB 1.1 port, I used an external box hooked to that port to hold the clone. Because the old USB port was so slow it took about an hour to copy. And those were really small drives.

 

Hi Johnny,

Thanks for the update. Please keep us posted on Windows progress. I am not clear on what environment you do have working now

I unfortunately had to a complete reinstall of Windows on the PC that had the clone problem, and reinstalled Acronis too. At the moment the clone operation is working, but if the clone copy problem happens to be a SW bug related to uninitialized data or a corrupt pointer, etc., who knows when it might return.

 

Hi,

I have a Dell 8200 with 1Gb of ram, 2 hard drives installed both are WD3200SB, 2 dvd writers, a ethernet/firewire card, nvidia ti 4200 graphics card, a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, and an adaptec 6 port usb 2.0 card. Software is windows SP2 XP Pro with office XP, and all the latest updates. Have Norton Sys Works 2006 and Norton Internet Security 2006, adaware and spybot. For maintenance have ccleaner and tuneup utilities (and norton sys works). Have a whole bunch of software, Adobe CS-2, Lahey Fortran compiler, the usual itunes, music match,... As you can see, nothing peculiar. This configuration shouldn't matter, I have had this problem for the past 2 years, since version 8, but it seems it might matter!

Cheers,
Johnny.

 

Hi Johnny,

In terms of the environment that Acronis got working for you, I was wondering mainly about your SW environment. You say you created a rescue CD but it wouldn't work from Windows. I am wondering where it worked from, do you boot to some sort of pre-Windows level? I am familiar with the bios level, and the DOS level, and the Windows level, but can't seem to figure out where that rescue CD got you to. I don't think I will try it unless I get desperate, just curious.

Thanks.

 

If the clone operations runs after a reboot from the Windows "blue screen" environement, how would someones Windows environement come into play.. I.e. Norton AV and other loaded software have not even been loaded when it is running from the "blue screen" right after a reboot. Right?

George

 

Hello terga,

When you boot from the Acronis bootable media (e.g. Acronis rescue CD) and select True Image Home (Full Version) you are running a stand-alone version of TI in a Linux based environment. This therefore eliminates any conflicts between TI and Windows/Windows applications.

Regards

 

Dear All,

The so-called rescue CD is supposed to have all of the necessary software to boot the computer and run Acronis TI. Once the rescue CD is created, you use it to boot the computer. The only running app will be acronis TI. I then go the the menu to select disk clone, and the menus in disk clone to clone my c: drive (primary master) onto my f: drive (primary slave). The only thing running in the computer's ram is Acronis TI. My understanding is that no other software is used or is running when a boot from the rescue cd is done.

With respect to how ATI software works, I do not know what the differences are between running disk clone from windows or from the rescue cd. I only know that the rescue cd works, and the windows version does not. I do not understand why the windows disk clone can't do the same thing that the rescue cd does (after all, acronis reboots itself from the disk, so why couldn't it use the same "software" as on the CD?). I asked Jeff these questions on the phone and did not get any satisfactory answers. Maybe I'm prying to much, all I know is that the problem persists.

Speaking with Jeff, he said Acronis "threw-in" disk clone. Well, that's about the only reason why I bought TI!. Somehow, I get the feeling that this problem is not on Acronis' priority list, yet the disk clone software is by far the most single important piece of software they have (at least for me).

FYI, I have a small business, it's in music production. The reason why I have "disk clones" instead of backups is that I absolutely cannot afford the down time. I would prefer throwing a hard disk in the garbage than monkey with it for an hour. Ever pay for a bunch of studio musicians? production crew? ever had a all-or-nothing dead-line on an already tight schedule? If you did, you would quickly discover how costly time can be. Because time is "mission critical", I made sure my computer has a very stable software environment, and clones that I can go back to. The production data is stored locally and on usb hard drives. The usb hard drives are not normally connected, except to store the production data. In the 5 years running, I have never had to rebuild the OS, never lost production data, and I have never had more than 5 minutes down time. But I did have to go back to a prior clone about a dozen times. Saved my bacon each time. I need it to stay that way.

Cheers,
Johnny.

 

back to the top, don't want this thread to drop off! Anyone with similar problems? Would love to hear from you!

Cheers,
Johnny.

 

Same experiences with identical Maxtors

I thought I would check in and report the same problem Johhny reported. I have True Image 10 and am trying to clone a running WindowXP system on Maxtor 300GB 7200rpm 16mb cache with an identical Maxtor 300GB drive. The new drive was "out-of-the-box", no formating or activation.

As original OP reported; I ran TI, Disk Clone and went through the dialogue and eventually click on reboot. The system reboots, and Acronis goes through: 1. Analyzing Partitions to 100%, 2. Locking Partitions to 100%, then goes to 3. Checking Partitions, but only makes it to 50%. Then True Image jumps to the page that says press any key to shutdown the computer. It did not perform any disk cloning. Then on re-starting, Acronis displays 3 completion bars: analyzing partitions, assigning drive letters, and syncronizing... then WindowsXP.

I tried the above procedure 3 times, twice using Manual clone mode and once using automatic. These where the parameters chosen:

Clone Mode - Manual (twice) Automatic (once)
Old Hard Disk Usage - Keep Data
Moving Method - As is

I ended up using Maxtor's Maxblaster4 to successfully clone the WindowsXP system to the new drive. I tested the new drive for "bootablilty" and general functionality and removed it from the system. (I can now go forward from this point looking for better (more effecient & effective) recovery alternatives)

My plans are to eventually use the TI-10's Backup & Recovery method for backing up my WindowXP system after I prove to myself it works reliably for recovering from a system hard disk crash. This method would also allow me to "reclaim" the unused space on my "backup hard drive" since I would be able to keep it online and available.

Note: I had just recovered from a system hard disk crash having to utilize my Sony Recovery Disks which puts me back to the "original" Sony installed system. From there I had to reinstall all my applications, delete unused stuff, etc... (about 2 days of work hunting for licences, serial numbers, etc.) I don't want to ever do that again. That's why I opted to create a clone of my running system. Knee jerk... perhaps. I will refine my backup & recovery going forward. Right now I have peace of mind.

Cheers,
Don

Ps: I hope Acronis finds the bug and corrects it.

 

BakupDon,

Your reason for cloning is exactly like mine. And that's why we need an ultra reliable Disk Clone, even from Windows. We really need Acronis to acknowledge this flaw, fix it, and make it 100% reliable.

Anyone else with the same problem? I would love to hear from you!

Thanks,
Johnny.

 

I have problem which may be related to disk cloning. I cloned a 120GB Seagate boot drive in 3 partitions to a new Seagate 320GB drive using TI8. It expanded the partitions to the new drive and it works perfectly.

There was also a 160GB Seagate drive for additional storage. If the 120GB drive and the 160GB drive are installed with the 320GB boot drive the computer reboots when running a virus scan programme or even moving large files from one folder to another in Windows Explorer.

Remove either of the smaller drives and the problem is gone. It happens randomly so it's not when it's moving particular files. I've tested the drives with Seagate's tools and they pass every time.

With the three drives installed "Windows Disk Management" sees the 160GB drive as Disk0, the boot drive as Disk1 and the other Disk2.

Remove one of the small drives and the boot drive becomes Disk0 and the other Disk1. Everything I've read about installing drives says that you would expect the boot drive to be Disk0.

Cheers
Langdon

 

Dear Friends,

Still no word from Acronis. Shame.

Johnny.