Cloning - Some clarification needed

I have TI 10.0 and I intend to clone my Win XP drive onto a new drive - this drive is currently in an external enclosure with a USB 2.0 connection to the PC.

Chapter 13 of the Acronis manual seems to have little or no information on what exactly to do after cloning has finished (please correct me if I have missed something) and, after browsing through various threads on this forum, I now feel that I could definitely do with some further information. Could I therefore ask if I am correct on the following points.

1) Is it true that after the cloning is completed, under no circumstances should the PC be restarted with both drives still connected - the external drive containing the clone should first be removed?

2) If the external drive is removed, is it possible to keep it "in storage" and carry on using the PC with the original C drive still in place for a while? One post on the forum suggests that it (the original C drive) will have been deactivated and that the PC will therefore be unusable until it is replaced by the clone drive.

3) Para 13.3.11 of the Acronis Manual states:

Cloning a disk containing the currently active operating system will require a reboot. In that case, after clicking Proceed you will be asked to confirm the reboot. Canceling the reboot will cancel the entire procedure.

It is unclear from the manual whether this refers to rebooting during the course of cloning or rebooting after finishing cloning. If the latter, does this not contradict any statements about not starting the PC with the original drive and the clone drive still in place?

 

John Dalton,

Food for thought.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

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

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1132968474;start=7#7

 

This requirement for removing the original, I think is more for an internal drive.
But since you have to remove the drive from the external case anyway, it should not matter in your situation as once you get the "Clone completed successfully" message you're going to exit acronis and shutdown to complete the change over of hard drives.
Re your #2, sure you can carry on using the original C drive. I actually did this two days ago after cloning to an external drive.

 

This is what I will do:

1. Clone from PC (boot) drive to new drive
2. Take out the PC drive and replace it with the new drive, i.e. only one drive now with the PC
3. Make sure that the new drive works well as a boot drive
4. Swop back the original boot drive and keep the new drive off-line as "spare", i.e. back to the original system

As for para 13.3.11, my understanding is: if you don't reboot, the whole cloning process will not even get started and will be aborted.

Cheers!

 

Thanks. Just to confirm that I have got it right, can anyone confirm that this is an acceptable cloning procedure.

1) Use Acronis 10 to clone the current internal C drive to the new external drive using "Automatic" so that the size is automatically scaled up from 40GB (the old internal HDD) to 120GB (the new external HDD).

2) Close down the PC.

3) Before doing anything else remove the cloned external drive from its USB 2.0 connection.

4) Reboot the PC. It is now possible to continue using the original internal C drive without any problems.

5) At some later date, remove the old internal C drive, replace it with the cloned external drive (after changing its jumper to Cable Select) and boot up. The PC will then automatically accept the new C drive without any need to take any further action.

 

Assuming TI10 does as you say in step 1, I have TI9, this should work fine.

However, I have misgivings about making a clone, sticking it on a shelf and planning on installing it sometime in the future. IMO, you should make sure the clone is a good when you create it. It would make more sense to use the new drive immediately and keep the old one on the shelf in case there is something wrong with the clone.

When you decide to install the clone you made earlier, it will no longer be up to date with any changes you made since you created it.

 

I would offer a slight modification. I like to use the bootable Rescue CD for all my Backup/Recover/Cloning instead of running the procedure from within windows. Others here are quite successful using TI from within windows, but I prefer not to tempt fate.

 

John, as mentioned in my links, putting a cloned HD in the drawer for later use isn't an efficient backup technique.

 

It isn't clear to me exactly what John is trying to achieve, whether it is to just backup or to put a larger drive into service albeit at a later date.

I certainly agree with you that cloning is not a good backup technique and really is intended for replacing an old drive with a new one. Granted, if the old drive works then whichever drive is put away does form a backup. The weakness in this approach is that you can only have one backup per hard-drive regardless of the amount of used space being backed up and the size of the backup drive.

Imaging , depending on the relative sizes of the source and destination drives, allows multiple backups to be stored on the same drive.

 

seekforever, I've reread John's posts and you are correct. We don't know what he desires and I may have mistakenly assumed it was for backup.

The Acronis cloning process is very robust and in numerous tests I couldn't make it fail.

 

Brian,
Were your tests done using the TI bootable CD, in Windows or both?

Thanks

 

I only did one clone from the CD environment. The rest were from Windows.

I can make a Ghost 9/10 clone fail (deliberately) but it only takes a minute to make it boot properly. I couldn't make a TI clone fail at all.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1164330999;start=0#0

 

I am thinking about cloning for this purpose (for backup purposes). This will give me a drive I know will work if my primary drive fails. I am also taking full backups of the primary drive and its partitions. If I can not retore to a new primary drive from the full backups, I will have the clone to fall back on. Then I could update it from the full backups.

Does this make sense? I have never restored to a new, blank drive from a full backup and am cautious that there might be a problem restoring the operating system.

 

Sorry If I've confused anyone. It wouldn't be for backup purposes. It would simply be to provide a possible breathing space between the cloning operation and installing the new, cloned drive. And the reason for this? Well, although I've opened the PC case a number of times to do such things as fitting a DVD rewriter or extra memory, I always find this a fiddly, rather nerve-racking experience (I'm obviously a born pessimist ) and would like some time to possibly do further checking before I go ahead.

 

I have a cloned image of my C drive and an image backup of my D drive. After reading these posts, should I create an image backup of my C drive also, as the cloned image is for creating a new image on a new hard drive? Am I reading this right?

 

If you want the cloned image of your C drive to stay up to date then making an image of your C drive on a regular basis is a better approach. A clone is an exact copy of the drive at the time you made it. If you use that "Clone" when your C drive fails you will not have any changes you made afterwards included. I only use cloning when moving to a new and/or larger hard drive. You can also restore an image to a new larger hard drive if needed. See this post for details Restoring to a larger hard drive

 

I have a 160Gb Maxtor drive that has some bad sectors. I have just bought ATI ver 10.0. I cannot image this disk due to the bad sectors. I propose to clone to a new disc installed as a slave drive and then change the new drive to master. I have not used ATI for this before. Can anyone see a problem with this?

 

A clone will let you get up and runing quickly but when when you clone, say Drive C, you have only one copy of the DRive C.

If you make backup images, you can have many copies of Drive C on the target drive -- as many as will fit -- which makes it easier to stay up to date without having to lose your prior backup or having to buy lots of drives.

If you make a clone for convenience noted above, it's still wise to make image files that are as current as you need -- in other words, if your Drive C goes wonky, how much are you willing to lose, how current do you want you backu to be?

 

Sheiber
That was my original intention but ATI won't let you make an image of a drive with bad sectors. As I understand it, it is possible to clone a such a drive onto a new drive and then swap drives. I presume the drive from which the clone is taken would still be accessible should there be some failure of the cloning operation.
Image files could then be made of the new cloned drive to another drive on the network.

 

Hello KeithP,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please notice that cloning and imaging the drive with bad sectors, however not recommended, is possible. Please do a disk checking first using Microsoft Checkdisk utility “chkdsk c: /r” for every partition (put partition letters in place of “c”) to mark bad sectors. Notice you will need to reboot to check the system partition.
Please have a look at this thread up to post #15 for instruction on how to restore/clone to a new disk from one with bad sectors, and not carry information about bad sectors.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Hello Marat Setdikov
By the time I received your response I had already cloned the drive with bad sectors to a new drive. Once a drive starts to display some bad sectors you do not wait indefinitely hoping it will not fail completely.
I had already run chkdsk with fix errors from XP on the old drive (it only had one partition), the bad sectors were the reason for the new disk. I tried to image the drive but, contrary to your statement above, TI refused due to the bad sectors. So I cloned it. This took 16 hours to complete. It did and still does reboot and run successfully from the new drive.
I presume that the reason chkdsk now hangs at 91% on the new drive is due to inappropriate information being copied from the old one.
If I create a new partition (to make two on the drive) will it resolve the problem with chkdsk not completing or it a case of suck it and see?

 

Someone said:

I only use cloning when moving to a new and/or larger hard drive. You can also restore an image to a new larger hard drive if needed.

In the first specific situation above (ie. replacing an existing hard drive, whether it be just picture, music, data files or a hard drive with an OS and programs on it) why even bother to use "Clone"?

I replaced an internal hard drive this past weekend (with a bigger HD) using "Imaging" of the whole drive and it worked just fine!

Therefore, can someone please explain why one should even bother with cloning at all, when imaging does it all (ie. an exact replica of your whole HD at the present moment to exchange HDs right away and/or if one wishes one can even make a copy of this image and then , after replacing and restoring the original drive's image to the new drive, keep the created image to build incremantals in the future)?
So again, why even bother with the "Cloning" option in the first place?

Rickk

 

Rickk,

I don't use clones at all in the real world. I've made many in test situations but I prefer restoring an image. The main reason why clones are preferred is time saving. It's a one step process. Restoring an image is two steps as you must create the image and then restore the image. But if you have already made the image then the time argument doesn't apply.

 

I never clone and I just use an image of my C drive. If I'm upgrading to a different disk I usually am also fooling with the partitions so just copy my non-C-drive data files to where I now want them.

Like Brian K said it is a bit faster. Also, I think a lot of initial customers buy TI to migrate to a different drive and cloning may well be simpler to understand and also you don't need an intermediate storage device which could be a problem for some new users.

 

Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I have tried cloning a drive and I also tried restoring a partition to a larger drive space. For example, I had a partition that was 30GB and tried restoring it to a 80GB drive (all the space) and in each instance, as soon as the boot screen would appear, the thing would stop and restart and again as the boot screen would appear, it would stop and restart and the cycle would continue until I turned the PC off. Can someone point out what I'm doing wrong and what I should be doing differently? Thanks.