Cloning new HDD

I am trying to clone my new 160GB HDD from my present 40GB HDD. uisng Acronis TI 9.
This new drive is empty and formatted without partitions
I start program.clone. automatic. source HDD. Destination HDD.
I then get a window which is "Non empty Destination HDD. I have to pick Delete partitions .nect I get the clone wizard:-
operation 1 Cleaning disk.
Operation 2 (reboot required in blue)
when I press proceed I get an Acronis blue screen saying something like locking drive and then I am asked to press any key to reboot. I do and nothing has happened.
What am I doing wrong. I have cloned before and was expecting to get the screen asking me if I wanted to keep the old data.
I hope you can understand what I am trying to say. Thanks J

 

Are you cloning from within Windows using ATI? If so, I would suggest you try cloning using your Rescue Disk which runs in a Linux environment.

 

Thank you. I shall try that,but it will have to be tomorrow now. I have been at it all day!.

 

The difference in using the Rescue Disk is that there won't be any booting required as you are presently experiencing. Once the cloning has completed you will be powering down your computer. Before the computer reboots pull the plug on your computer, remove the source drive and replace it with the target drive as Master. Now replug and boot your computer with the new drive. You have to do this in order not to confuse Windows as to which drive is the C: drive. Once Windows has recognised the new drive as the C: drive you can at a later time connect the old drive as Slave and go about formatting it using Windows Disk Management and using it for some other purpose such as storing images of your system.

My long explanation supposes that you are using the source drive as Master and the target drive as Slave. If the target drive is a USB drive or a drive in an external enclosure you would proceed in a similar fashion, mutatis mutandis.

 

Thank you very much for your help and explanation. I was trying to clone within Windows. What I do not understand is why I got the window saying it was a non-empty disk. That was where it all went wrong. I expected to be asked if I wanted to save the data on the source disk,but that never came up. It was a new formated HDD. When I originally got the message and all went pear-shaped,I formatted it again and tried again with the same result.
Have you any suggestions,as to why iit did not go according to the manual? Thanks. J

 

Well, it's not quite a matter of Windows not seeing the drive as C, it's a matter of Windows accepting only one boot and one sys drive and if it sees two when it starts trying to boot, it will mark only one as boot and sys drive. Unfortunately, it might mark one as sys and the other as the boot drive, which makes things rather messy.

So definitley, once you clone a Win sys/boot disk, one must be removed before you reboot. If you do not, at best, one of the drive will be marked as neither boot or sys drive and not be usable as a bootable windows sys drive.

sh

 

Thank you. shieber . That does not really answer my query.I appreciate your help. J

 

I don't have an answer for you as to why things went wrong when you tried cloning your present drive to a new drive from within Windows. However when you consider what you are trying to do it is not surprising that you will encounter roadblocks. You are asking Windows to take a snapshot of itself and to restore that snapshot to a new drive. You can read the following technical article to learn more as to how Acronis goes about doing this. As you can see it is not a simple procedure. That is why cloning using the Rescue Disk is so much simpler because your are not using Windows to clone but are using Linux instead.

 

Thank you very much for your help DID. I have cloned a HDD before using windows. I know that this does not prove anything as to why I could not do it this time.
I do not doubt what you are saying and I appreciate your help but there is nothing in the maual to suggest that you cannot clone a disk within windows.
(page 38-47).
Next time,if there is one, I will clone using my resue disk as you suggest. This time I got around the problem by restoring the Image I had made on my Ext HDD. This worked fine and I am up and running. Again,I must thank you very much for your help. I have printed out the "Technical article" and will peruse this later. J

 

Hello badger,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

First of all, please make sure you use the latest build (3854) of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home. To get access to updates you should first register your software.

Please notice that Acronis True Image 9.0 Home recognizes the target drive as empty if it contains only unallocated space (no file system). After formating the drive is not marked as empty.

When you are using automatic cloning mode, Acronis True Image 9.0 Home does not ask about data on source drive, it is kept by default. If you want to choose what to do with old drive data, please choose manual cloning mode.

Please also download the Acronis drivers, install it and see if the problem still persists.

If that does not help either then please collect some information to help us investigate the issue thoroughly:

- Reinstall Acronis Drivers you downloaded with logging enabled;
- Reproduce the problem;
- Get the log file without closing any application windows (including the error message windows if there are any). The log file will be created at C:\ . The name of the log file will be snapapi.log

Please make a screen shot of the Device Tree application the way described in this previous post.

Please also create Acronis Report and Windows System Information as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov