Can't Clone HD

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by Hose, May 4, 2006.

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  1. Hose

    Hose Registered Member

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    Tried to clone my HD #1 -> #2. The setup appeard OK, but after reboot it went directly to the "congratulations...", finished page without copying anything to the 2nd drive.

    I tried uninstalling/reinstalling Acronis TI, but the problem remains.

    Any ideas where to look?

    WinXP Home, ATI v8, Build 937

    TIA,

    Hose
     
  2. Chutsman

    Chutsman Registered Member

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    Make the bootable TI Rescue cd and boot from it, then use the Clone feature again. If that doesn't work, you can try making an Image backup to a third drive (preferably external) then Restore that image to the #2 drive.
     
  3. Hose

    Hose Registered Member

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    I cloned from boot disk, and it appeared to be completed normally. However, after cloning the system would not recognize the 2nd disk.

    Unless someone has another suggestion, I'm going to have to presume it's something with Windows.
     
  4. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    Did you disconnect the original drive before the first successful boot into windows?
     
  5. Hose

    Hose Registered Member

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    Pardon? I never do that. I just copy c: to d: and continue with c: as primary.
     
  6. Chutsman

    Chutsman Registered Member

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    Just to be sure, by "boot disk", do you mean your C drive or the bootable TI CD?

    And what Seekforever means is that after a clone procedure is done, before you test the cloned drive you must disconnect or remove the original drive before trying to boot with the newly cloned drive.
     
  7. Hose

    Hose Registered Member

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    Bootable TI CD.

    I wasn't trying to boot from the "cloned to" HD. I booted from the source HD, but Windows didn't recognize that a HD, D:, was mounted. BIOS recognized it, though. I swapped out the IDE cable, but that didn't change anything.
     
  8. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    Two identical drives with identical partition signatures can cause problems. See if this link is of any help:

    http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm
     
  9. Hose

    Hose Registered Member

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    I believe that's ancient info. I've always swapped HDs freely without concern to drive letters. Just set the drives to CS and Windows gets it right.
     
  10. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello Hose,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

    Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

    Please note 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.

    Please try to boot from the cloned hard drive keeping the source hard drive disconnected.

    Thank you.
    --
    Kirill Omelchenko
     
  11. goldenrules

    goldenrules Registered Member

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    I'm not sure I have the exact same problem as Hose, but it seems so similar I thought I'd reply to the last post instead of opening up a new one.

    I too just today cloned my original hard drive, which has always been C:, with True Image 9 to a new hard drive. I used Cable Select jumper setting on both old and new drives, plugged the Master connection to the old drive and the Slave connection to the new drive and was able apparently to clone my old drive to the new one. I got the nice blue (not the bad blue, BSOD) Congratulations! screen from Acronis telling me that my clone was verified 100% successful. I also recall it reminding me to go back in and either reset jumpers or cable connections if I wanted to boot from the new drive (which I do). I also recall some advertisement for some other Acronis product that would render my old drive data unreadable. But I don't remember seeing any discussion about completely unplugging my old drive before the first boot from my new drive! So all I did was connect the Master connection to my new drive (which I want to be my new C: drive) and the Slave connection to the old drive (which I want to be some other unused drive letter, as my ultimate plan is to wipe this old drive and use it for data), and rebooted.

    Windows XP came up just fine so I went to My Computer, but the only hard drive referenced is the new one, not also the old one. So I decided to reboot and go into the BIOS. The BIOS sees both drives (Maxtor - Old and Seagate - New), sees them correctly (Primary Master: Seagate, Primary Slave: Maxtor), and shows the Seagate as the Boot Hard Drive.

    Rebooted back to XP; same thing with My Computer. Shows C: to be the new Seagate drive, and shows all the other original drives correctly: A: floppy, D:Samsung CD-R, E:Samsung DVD.

    BUT if in My Computer I right click on the C: drive and select Properties, and then select the Hardware tab, I see all the drives including the Primary Slave Maxtor. So Windows XP knows about it. Further both drives, old and new, appear in Device Manager, AND if I go to Computer Management (right click on My Computer icon on Desktop and select Manage) and select Disk Managment I see both drives. Labeling is:

    Disk 0
    Basic
    111.79 GB
    Online

    Disk 1
    Basic
    76.32 G
    Online


    Soooo, How do I get Disk 1 to appear to My Computer as the D: driveo_O

    Many thanks in advance.
     
  12. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    Until you get the stuff at the following link squared away there is a good chance you will be chasing your tail. Method #3 seems easy to do if you have the W95/98 recovery floppy disk.

    http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

    All the channel Master, Slave, Cable-select stuff does is basically set the address of the drive in the IDE controller, if XP gets confused and is issuing a wrong or no device address it doesn't matter what you did with the jumpers.
     
  13. Hose

    Hose Registered Member

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    Follow Up....
    I finally replaced the CMOS battery (it was low, but maybe not quite dead), did a "clear NV RAM" and restored my system from an image 9 months ago.

    Problem appears to be solved, but not 100% sure yet. However, I made this observation which may be of some general interest...

    1. When I cloned starting from the Acronis desktop icon, it almost always works properly, but sometimes not. When it does not work, the screen goes straight to "clone completed" without copying.

    2. There is a possibility that a couple of my HDs are resistant from being cloned from the Acronis Desktop icon, so I booted from Acronis boot CD and cloned from it. While the cloning process appeared to have worked correctly, no drive letter was assigned to the target drive. In that case and after the completion of cloning, I made that target drive the Primary Master, disconnected the one which had been the Source drive, and rebooted. Windows then assigned the Target drive as C:, and booted properly.

    I have generally been "cloning C: => D:" to make a quick backup of my working drive without making any other drive changes. (And when I've rotated my backup drives, I just replace the D: drive with a different HD and again copy "C: => D:") This process has almost always worked properly. Perhaps due to some acquired glitch in my Windows or perhaps a quirk of some HDs, this may not always work on every HD. So far in those cases, I've been able to boot from Acronis Boot CD and make the copy.
     
  14. Chutsman

    Chutsman Registered Member

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    Goldenrules, try renaming the volume of the cloned drive, the new Seagate. I've noticed that TI will give the cloned drive the same name as the original.
     
  15. goldenrules

    goldenrules Registered Member

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    Thanks chutsman for the advice...I thought yesterday about doing just what you suggest, but didn't have the confidence in this area of my XP knowledge. "first do no further harm..."

    With your encouragement, I went to My Computer, right click, selected Manage, the Computer Management tool, double clicked Disk Management, and right clicked on the listing for my old Maxtor drive. Then I selected Change Drive Letter and Paths..., clicked Add, gave me the option to Assign the following drive letter, and I selected F: (I would have liked to select D, but my CD Drive was set up originally as D: - I suppose I could change it via the same interface but I'd rather now tempt fate...I could also let my perfectionist tendency go.) :)

    One question: In this Disk Management utility, for the C: drive (new Seagate) under the Status column, the display reads Healthy (System), while directly below this, for the F: drive (old Maxtor) under Status the display reads Healthy (Active). What is the difference between System and Active? Is this just an indication w/o going out to the BIOS as to which is the boot harddrive, i.e., does System here mean "Boot hard drive"? Or is there more to this System vs Active? And what exactly DOES "Healthy" mean? (I cloned the Maxtor to a new HD only because all disk management utilities are telling me that the Maxtor is failing and needs to be replaced, hence the new Seagate and the IT9 cloning.)

    Many thanks, chutsman, again, for carefully reading my long post and giving me specific instructions (encouragement?) to correct this.
     
  16. Chutsman

    Chutsman Registered Member

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    Golden, sorry, but I've never had to use that feature in XP. I was actually referring to the volume name, not the drive letter. To change the volume name:

    Double click on My Computer.
    R-click on the C drive and choose Rename.
    Name it anything you like, e.g. Sea120g.

    If that doesn't work, drop me a PM for another suggestion for Cloning.

    Oh, I don't recall if you said what version and build number of TI you were using.
     
  17. goldenrules

    goldenrules Registered Member

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    Chutsman, I'm out of town not near the desktop. But it's the trial version of True Image 9...whatever the build is that was downloadable last week.

    Things seem just fine now. And interestingly, now that I had everything backed up, and a new harddrive, and everything seemingly working normal with the new harddrive, I went back to the Maxtor diagnostic program (the one that warned me that the drive was in dire risk of failure, and this time had the nerve to run the "Repair drive" task. I hadn't had the nerve to run this prior since I had no backups and no new harddrive. And this Repair Drive task had a very threatening message prior to execution that indicated it may not work but then again your drive is probably toast anyway (or some words to that effect) and warned that I needed to backup. Anyway I ran that and miracle! It said the drive is repaired....did the long burn in test, and the old Maxtor is "certifiably error free." So I guess I did all this work for nothing. :)
     
  18. Chutsman

    Chutsman Registered Member

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    Maybe for nothing ... but at least you know something about True Image. My philosophy is to use TI only to make an Image backup perhaps once a month. But I backup my data and documents using Windows Explorer to an external usb hard drive about once every two weeks.

    I'm willing to reinstall my programs and OS if the drive gives trouble and the programs and OS have to be reinstalled. This helps me get rid of all the junk that accumulates in the Registry.

    Glad to hear the Maxtor has been repaired with the diagnostic software. Personally I like Maxtors.
     
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