Disk cloning doesn't work?

I bought Acronis Home True Image 10 to clone my existing drive to a larger one. It has a nice wizard that guides you through this. I was going from a 250GB SATA drive to a 750GB SATA drive. Both drives were connected. The old drive was as it came from Dell. A small partition for EISA parameters or something. The big middle NTFS data partition occupying most of the drive. And a final partition with Dell Diagnostics on it, surrounded by some unused space.

I let the Wizard automatically set the sizes of the new partitions. It restarted the computer and entered some command line mode. After a (short) while it says it was successful. I reboot the computer, and the new drive isn't there. Thankfully (unlike some other posts on Amazon), my old drive still was--the program just didn't do anything.

Now cloning a 250GB drive should take a few hours, and this was done far too quickly, so I pretty much knew it hadn't been successful.

I have since tried manually setting the partition sizes. Nothing. In all cases the new drive is left unpartitioned. I have manually formatted the new drive, and run disktest against it, and it is totally fine. But the cloning operation in ATI 10 Home doesn't seem to do anything...

What is going on?

 

Hello gconnery,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

First of all, please make sure you use the latest build (4940) of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home. To get access to updates you should first register your software.

Please also try performing cloning operation using Acronis Bootable Rescue Media (don't forget to recreate it after updating).

Please notice that it's not recommended to resize special partitions created by computer manufacturer, as it may make them unusable.

Please also notice that it is strongly recommended to remove either the source, or destination drive before booting after cloning, to avoid Windows confusing boot sequence.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Updating to the new version didn't change anything. Just the same message about how it completed successfully, in way too little time, and nothing was done, except make my Windows machine unbootable (booting to previous known good configuration gets me out of the loop). This is pretty bad.

Booting a rescue CD and running the program from there, however, did work, and I have now successfully cloned the drive and switched. Thank you very much. Still can't recommend the product though, since it doesn't mention that this is possible. Personally it seems like the obvious safe way to clone a drive rather than the convoluted lock/reboot/hack into early windows startup method you are attempting to use that apparently doesn't work very well. The wizard that you run should suggest that this is an alternative.

 

The reason the cloning worked from the Rescue Cd and not from the installed software is that there is probably something running in the background in windows that interferes with the process.

 

Hello gconnery,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

In order to investigate the issue you have experienced when using Acronis True Image under Windows and to provide you with a possible solution please collect the following information:

- Create Acronis Report and Windows System Information as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Please keep both hard drives connected while creating Acronis Report.

- Please make a screen shot of the Device Tree application the way described in this previous post of mine.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

I had the same problem. I posted this on another forum and they suggested I post here instead.......

I have been trying unsuccessfully to use Acronis True Image 10 Home to clone my entire hard drive (master) to a brand new hard drive (slave) including all the Windows XP operating system, all applications and data.

The hard drives are both Maxtor 80 GB hard drives. The source drive has aprroximatey 30GB of data on it. The destination drive is brand new.

Although the process says everything has worked successfully, only about 5 GB has been copied (looking at the disk properties in My Computer). The process is very quick - less than 5 minutes (suspicious?). In Windows Explorer, although the drive has a drive letter assigned, there is nothing showing (data wise) on the disk although in Properties it suggests that something has been copied onto it.

When I remove my old disk and change the new disk over to be the master drive, it tries to boot up but fails at the point where it should load Windows.

I have tried this 3 times now and get the same result each time.

I ran Acronis from Windows and it does its cloning after a forced reboot.

I have run chkdsk/f to check my source drive for problems and have also run the Windows built in utility to check for bad sectors but neither has reported any problems.

The reason why I want to clone the entire drive is that I have recently been experiencing some problems when trying to boot my PC and feel that it is about to crash completely one day. When I have removed the caddy and re-inserted it, the PC boots with no problems.

It should be noted, that I do have an external drive that I back my data up to each night but I can't use that as a boot disk in the event of my primary drive failing. Its a Seagate 200GB external HD in a hard case that I can't remove to put in my caddy.

I have another spare disk that I cloned about a year ago using Norton Ghost that just contains the XP operating system and basic programs but no data. I no longer use Norton on my PC so can't use that to clone hence why I recently bought Acronis.

Anyway, any suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong? Is my primary disk corrupt? If I can't use Acronis because it detects that my primary disk is corrupt and stops cloning at that point, what other software is there for me to clone my primary drive?

P.S. The answer may be to run it from the Rescue CD but this seems rather odd.

 

Hello Flexible Friend,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please make sure you use the latest build (4942) of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home. To get access to updates you should first register your software. Don't forget to recreate Acronis Bootable Rescue Media after updating.

If updating does not solve the problem, please download the latest version of Acronis drivers, unpack the archive and install unpacked MSI package.

Please also try performing the cloning procedure using Acronis Bootable Rescue Media (as it uses Linux environment, it may succeed where Windows version fails due to interference of third-party software).

If the issue persists, please collect some information to let us investigate it thoroughly:

- Replace C:\WINDOWS\system32\snapapi.dll with the one from the downloaded SnapAPI archive;
- Reproduce the issue and collect the log file without closing any application windows (including the error message windows if there are any). The log file will be created at C:\ . The name of the log file will be snapapi [date-time].log

Please create Acronis Report and Windows System Information as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Flexible Friend,

Three times is enough. I'd consider a variant of this way...

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=168066

 

Thanks Brian K.

In the end, I gave up with Acronis and used Casper instead.

http://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/

 

How did you find Casper? I found it reliable but slow.

 

Not odd really ... there is probably something running in the background in Windows that doesn't stop after the reboot and it interferes with the cloning process.

 

Yes, very slow .. 2 to 3 hours for 23GB (80GB disk)! I left it running overnight. But seems to have done the job.