Clone problems w/vista business

Good day,

A bit of history: I just received a dell computer that has 2 partitions, the first partition is the recovery partition and the second partition is the OS.

I want to clone the hard drive before I even boot up for the first time. On wednesday I purchased TI 10 and installed it on the old computer so I could make the bootable CD. The bootable CD was created and everything looked fine.

I booted the Dell with the TI CD and created a "clone" of the entire disk. Everything worked great. I was scared because it was way to easy. I then removed the original HD and put in the clone and rebooted.

Problem is, not it keeps rebooting over and over again. It gets past the post and begins reading the HD then reboots.

Thoughts?

-MarkusR

 

markusr99208,

Strange, Dells usually have 3 partitions. A 40 MB diagnostic partition. the OS and a recovery partition containing a Ghost image. Maybe it's different with Vista.

Did you clone to an internal or external HD?

Could you describe this in more detail?

 

Well, you might be correct with three partitions.

The drives were internal. The original drive was in SATA 0 and I put the new HD in SATA2. Ran clone using the wizard and used the default settings. After cloning I remove SATA 0 drive and move the SATA2 drive to SATA 0.

I boot up, it posts, Dell logo goes away, displays the raid bios information, then flashes and reboots. Never displaying anything about Vista.

If I hit ESC (I believe) just after the raid bios information I get a menu, to boot Vista, Diagnostics or recovery. So everything appears to be there but it then reboots if I choose Vista. I ran some diags and everything appears to be good on that end as well.

-MarkusR

 

It's not getting very far at all. Others here have reported similar problems cloning Vista and have suggested a repair. This web site is about dual booting Vista clones but there may be something that helps.

http://www.multibooters.co.uk/cloning.html

 

You might be on to something here but this may be something that Acronis needs to address. Not really the dual boot issue, but an independant clone should work since that i why I bought their software.

I will read your link and respond back what I find out.

-Markus

 

Hey Brian you were absolutely correct. I put this vista cd in the drive, ran it, chose the install option then chose the repair and everything worked great!

Just need to get Disk Director working now

 

I'm pleased you are up and running. I have very little experience with Vista and I just quoted something I read here. I have installed Vista to a Virtual Machine on a temporary basis and found that my sound card is not supported. It seems slower than WinXP but the Virtual Machine may be part of the problem.