Marketing Director

Symantec/Norton Ghost blows chunks, Acronis True Image Rocks.

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Whoa.

Gotta say, I'm impressed with Acronis True Image - tried the demo today and I'm sold.

Here's the timeline:

Bought a 5400rpm 80GB drive to replace the 4200rpm 80GB drive in my notebook; I do video editing on the road; the old drive wasn't keeping up.

The drives are virtually identical other than RPM - both Fujitsu's, both MHT2080's. The 4200rpm is a 2080AT, the 5400rpm a 2080AH. Same number of sectors, bytes etc.

Put the new drive in a USB2 external box (tried two different boxes in fact) and tried Norton Ghost 2003.

That really didn't work at all. Ghost would see the drives but timed out on a "29005 error" EVERY TIME. Every conceivable option was tested - all the radio buttons, check boxes, modes. Nothing. We're not dumb around here and we convinced ourselves that piece of software just wouldn't do it.

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OK...upgrade to Ghost 9.0. Slightly more promising. Spent over an hour dumping the data with the clone feature. Nice to be able to stay in Windows while it's working. Swap the drives, reboot.

Same problem others have reported here: Windows XP *APPEARS* to boot and gets to a screen that has a WinXP logo, dual shades of blue...and nothing. The "Welcome" and login names are missing.

WTF?! We pay good money for Symantec products. Fact is, this is a repeatable issue. You'd think they'd fix it.

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Acronis True Image next.

Clone drive... OK...a bit nerve wracking when you select the "source" and "destination" drives and it describes both as "C:" drives... kinda got the feeling it was trying to overwrite my main drive. Forge ahead...

Reboot - blinkity blink - both drives talking to each other... progress bar creeping away. Done.

Shut down, swap drives.

Fingers crossed - c'mon, not another Norton-two-tone-WinXP-blue-screen-please... NOPE! Welcome to Windows XP!!!

Wow!

That was remarkably painless!

On the assumption I'm missing something, I'm keeping drive #2...errr...#1...? (the old one) around "just in case." I know I've got the data there.

KUDOS to Acronis! You paid attention, did your chores and built something that does what the 800 pound Gorrilla, Symantec, can't do.

Thanks! You've got my business.

Chris Patten - Marketing Director, Capital Air Sports
chris@capitalairsports.knowspam.com

My advice is to manually delete any partitions you may have on the destination drive before cloning. I use a DOS bootdisk with DELPART on it for this.

Then plug in your drive with data to be copied and when it comes to selecting source/destination you shouldn't be able to choose destination drive as a source by mistake and wipe all your data. Simple but effective.