Booting w/ Clone Installed

Can someone point out a way to safely do this? I run from a SATA RAID and clone to an IDE RAID. Sometimes I'd like to boot with both connected just to grab a file from the clone. of course, the drive letter assignments get all screwed up with the SATA RAID becoming unbootable.

I can clone back from IDE to SATA just fine. I have problem disconnecting the SATA RAID and booting from the IDE RAID - it doesn't work very well.

Ghost never had this problem, but it doesn't work on my hardware anymore. Acronis works great, just this 'presence of clone' issue.

Open to suggestions.

Thanks.

 

It is my understanding that after the first successful boot you can reconnect the other drive(s).

There is software that will erase the partition signatures which causes Windows to redetect the partitions. That may be a fix. How this stuff works with Raid is unknown to me.

 

Nope, did that and sure enough the clone assumed C and messed everything up, as it always did.

 

Unless you are re-cloning from time to time it will become out of date. If you have no other backups you will be at risk as the clone is being over written.
What I am coming round to is to suggest that perhaps imaging as a method would suit you better. Files or whatever can be copied back without having to change any physical connections. Just mount the image using TI. A drive letter is assigned in seconds and then this virtual drive is then ready for use.

Xpilot

 

That is a poor choice in the endeavor of having a disk ready to go if the first one fails. In this scanario there are three sets of disks needed; The original boot, one to hold the image and then one to copy the image to when the boot fails.

It all can be done with the clone ready to go at a moments notice, of course assuming it is reasonably up to date. There should be no need to increase the # of drives by 50% just to have a bootable backup system.

To be honest I don't understand why TI has such problems in this regard; the old Ghost NEVER had this problem (although it has other issues).

 

Just think ahead a bit. When one of your drives physically fails you will get a replacement right?
So according to my reckoning that also makes a total of three drives. Nothing I suggested implies that you should have a third drive on hand before disaster strikes. Many failures can be cured by restoring an image to an existing drive. However as I am ultra cautious I do in fact have a third drive to hand so that I never have to take the risk of restoring over a mainly good drive which contains data as well as the OS.
I am not aware of any particular problems with cloning in TI, other than operator error.
But as they say "Each to his own"

Xpilot

 

LOL, you can't be serious. I sure hope you don't speak for Acronis.

 

Hello jgivens,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please remember that in order to clone your Windows system to a different hardware, you should first prepare Windows using Microsoft System Preparation Tool (Sysprep). http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/faq.html#30

Please be aware that we do not guarantee the successful transferring of your operating system to a different hardware. Actually, no one can guarantee this.

Please note also that we recommend you to unplug one of the hard drives right after the disk cloning process has been finished, since keeping both original and cloned hard drives connected might cause different boot or drive letter assignment problems.

I would also like to add that even in case of using Microsoft System Preparation tool (sysprep) we cannot guarantee the successful transferring of the operating system to a computer with the hardware configuration different from that of the original machine. The point is that sysprep allows replacing drivers only for Plug-and-Play devices (sound cards, network adapters, video cards etc.). As for system HAL and boot device driver, they must be identical in the source and target computers (see Microsoft Knowledge Base articles 302577 and 216915).

If you want to be completely sure that the restored operating system will boot and function normally then we recommend that you use Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation, Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows or Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server for Windows in conjunction with Acronis Universal Restore for your purposes (depending on which operating system you use). Acronis Universal Restore technology provides an efficient solution for hardware-independent system restoration by replacing the crucial HAL and hard disk controller drivers. Please read more information on how to use Acronis Universal Restore in corresponding Acronis True Image version User's Guide.

As Xpilot said above, it would be better to create an image of your SATA RAID and keep this image on your IDE RAID. If you need to copy some files from your SATA RAID, you can mount your image and copy necessary files or folders.

Please note that the image creation option allows you to restore both an entire hard drive/partition and the individual files and folders. Please read more in this FAQ article.

You can also find more information on how to use Acronis True Image in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
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Tatyana Tsyngaeva