Best procedure to clone a drive

Just purchased TI 11 and want to clone my laptop 120 GB drive to a 120 GB drive via USB. What's the best way to do that and avoid some of the disasters I've read about?

I tried cloning from within Windows XP and got as far as TI doing the first reboot, it read the first partition, said successful image and to push any key to shut down. It seems like it should be going thru a succssive number of reboots. When I restarted my laptop I saw nothing on the new drive. I've got a boxed version and I hadn't updated it yet.

1) I will be updating it but should I try it again while the OS is running? or
2) Do it from the as is bootable CD? or
3) Create a bootable CD with an updated version of the program (if that's possible)? Thanks.

 

It's always safer to do it from the bootable cd. You need to at least know that the bootable cd will see your external drive. Sometimes it will not do so because of the chipset in the external drive.

 

OK, thanks, I'll give that a try. So were there any cloning issues with the original bootable CD?

 

I'm still using ver 9 (it does everything I need) so cannot say how ver 11 boot cd performs.

 

You do not say what your plans are for the new drive. Also, are both IDE or Sata or mixed?

Be absolutely certain to disconnect one drive before booting the very first time following the clone. Let Windows get settled before attaching a duplicate drive. Under normal cloning conditions, Windows will NOT boot into Windows from a USB boot drive.

If you plan on installing the new drive in place of the old,
many suggest that you remove the old and attach the new in intended location.
Attach the old as the usb.
Clone from usb to new disk using the TI Rescue CD. (Boxed version is a TI Rescue CD--but probably not most current build).

Disconnect usb before booting new clone. You don't want Windows seeing two drive C system drives!

Many of us suggest that you un-install any previous version before installing a new update or version. Each update is a stand-alone install.

 

Hello RPS,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please make sure you use the latest build (8053) of Acronis True Image 11 Home. To get access to updates you should first register your software. Don't forget to recreate Acronis Bootable Rescue Media after updating.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

This was a really old post but I finally got around to cloning my drive and maybe my experience will help others doing the same.

The reason I wanted an identical (or nearly so) drive was for use "on the road". I wanted all the programs and the same setup but not my personal or business files in case my laptop got stolen.

Well here's how the procedure went:

1) I made a bootable CD with the latest build (8053) and tried it out on a desktop computer (not mine of course) and it booted from the disk fine. I did have a problem using this disk with my laptop though. It may have been because I burned two copies of the software to the disk. One in the Recovery Folder and all the individual files outside it. I don't know but no matter what I did I could not get it to boot from my laptop. F11 on boot or setting the CD/DVD to boot first in BIOS.

2) So what to do? I didn't want to put the original drive back and try to burn another one so I tried to install XP but since it was a Recovery CD that came with the computer for some reason it got hung up and couldn't find the NTLDR (OS loader). So next I spent a couple of hours loading a VISTA OS on it, updating it (55 updates) and then loaded TI 11 and reburned a Bootable CD. I thought, if I can't get this to work at least I could reload all my programs and files.

3) Next I tried booting from this CD. It worked perfectly!! In 20 mins or so I had an exact duplicate of my original drive and it booted perfectly as well. There was some consternation with this procedure but I got it to work and I'm happy with the result, so far.

I have some other issues, like saving Application Settings, that don't seem to work. But, that's another Thread.