Can Acronis 10 be used to clone two partitions to a new drive with Vista?

I've got a Gateway laptop with two partitions -- the system and the recovery partition, 83GB and 10GB. I've got a 160 gig drive in a USB 2.0 external enclosure that I'd like to clone the original drive to. I purchased Acronis at the recommendation of some users on another forum, and I'm trying to use the Clone option. I'm choosing Manual, selecting the source and destination drives, keep data on original drive, proportionate copy (it comes out to like 15GB and 125GB which is fine by me), and start. The program says it needs to reboot. When it does, it sits at a DOS-style screen and checks the partitions, then within about a minute it says the drive imaging is complete.

That's great, but when you boot into Windows, there's not even a partition on that external drive, much less any files!

Is there something I'm doing wrong here? Does Acronis maybe not support cloning Vista to an external drive? It's Home Premium, if that makes a difference.

 

Reply/followup: I just read a post on here about creating a boot CD and trying it from there. Made one and it appears to be copying the partition -- didn't make me reboot or anything. Looks like it's got 4 hours remaining (though that's fluctuating pretty wildly). We'll see what happens afterwards and if that fixes it, I'll just delete this thread.

Might wanna make a sticky message at the top of the forum about this "problem" since it looks like it's pretty common!

 

Hello sumorez,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

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

Please notice that cloning is mainly intended to be used when moving the system to a new hard drive. Therefore, cloning to external drive is not recommended, as Windows cannot boot from those. Please also notice that it's generally not recommended to resize or move recovery partitions, as that may make them unusable.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov