Clone a running operating system drive?

I know it's possible to clone guest drive A onto guest drive B in a workshop computer where the OS is on host drive C, as I do it frequently and it works well. Drive C is on IDE0, drive B is usually on IDE1 and drive A usually on a Promise PCI\IDE card.

But what I'd like to do this time is, in my personal system, clone drive D onto drive E where the OS is on drive D.

Is this possible? - to clone a running, functioning drive onto a bare drive in this way? (Acronis True Image 8 is the cloning app. and is mounted on drive D, which is running XPP-NTFS)

The idea is to back up my system drive, by simply cloning the entire thing onto another drive of equal size or bigger. The motivation is to keep the process as simple as possible, so that, in the event of a serious crash, the drives could just be swapped and the system back to normal within minutes.

Comments would be appreciated.

 

I have a laptop. I did not use the clone procedure but took a standard image, while Windows was running, of my system drive to an external harddrive. I then inserted a replacement harddrive into my laptop and restored the image, using the "Rescue" CD, from the external drive to the replacement drive. I was able to boot the laptop into Windows using the new drive without any problem.

 

Hello porty,
Hello johnpd,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

Both ways are possible and no errors should appear. Just press the "Clone disk" button as usual and follow the directions in wizard.

Thank you,
--
Best regards,
Ilya Toytman

 

Is the same true of TI 7?

 

Thanks Ilya. If you say a clone can be made from a running system, I'll get myself another 120gb drive and try it.

Re the image alternative, as jpd spoke about, that method is one heck of a lot of work compared to cloning, but you probably don't have much alternative with a laptop, unless you cloned onto an external hard drive.

And I must say, while I find True Image excellent for cloning, I've had nothing but problems with it's imaging facility. In fact, most of the attempts I've made have failed. The system used for the imaging and retrieval is a 1ghz, XPP with 256 ram, the same system I use for cloning.

I've tried both Normal and None compression methods and I'm darned if I can make it work reliably. Oh, it's been successful maybe twice out of 12 or so attempts, but even one failure is too many for me, when the drive information is important.

So I only clone, now. I use up a lot of hard drives this way but I know I can count on the results.

 

Hello porty,

Could you please explain what problems you encounter when trying to create an image? Please tell the version of Acronis True Image you use and what actually you are trying to do.

Thank you.

--
Ilya Toytman

 

I'm afraid I can't provide much information, Ilya, as I've only used the imaging facility twice in the last year or so, because of it's unreliability.

I can't remember what happened prior to a year ago, except that it was rarely successful, but on the last occasion, which was about two weeks back, the freshly imaged drive hung when it got to the "Verifying DMI pool data" stage.

I left it for 10 minutes or so but it wouldn't go any further. I tried it again later with an uncompressed image but it still wouldn't proceed.

The version used on the last occasion was 8. A year ago it was probably 7.

The reason for the imaging procedure was to back-up a system drive.

 

Hello porty,

Are you able to restore the back up using the latest 786 build of Acronis True Image? If not please contact support@acronis.com with the description of your actions. We will do our best in order to help you.

Thank you.

--
Ilya Toytman

 

No, Ilya, I haven't tried build 786. I'll install it and let you know what happens.

Have a nice Xmas.

 

Hi again. I intended to have a trial run at cloning my running system drive, so I thought I'd start by cloning my 8gb C: drive onto a spare 20gb disk.

But C: shares my system disk with partitions D and E and it now appears that Acronis is unable to clone just one partition out of several. (D and E total a further 75gb)

Is this indeed the case, or am I missing something?

 

Hello Porty

Yes, that is indeed the case. No sarcasm intended but it is called "Disk Clone" not "Partition Clone" after all.

You'll need to use TI's "Create Image" function if you want to backup/move separate partitions. I see that you've had problems creating images in the past but how goes it now with the latest build (786) and what medium do you image to?

Regards

 

it works perfectly well stupid people otherwise go to paragon