Cloning to USB Drive

Most users know that TrueImage8 fails to clone properly from within Windows XP when using an external USB2 drive because after the required reboot TrueImage 8 fails to detect the attached external USB2 drive generating the "Error: Disk Not Found" message.

My own workaround that seems to work reliably every time is to ignore TrueImage8's advertised ability to clone while running under Windows and instead, to boot from the TrueImage8 Rescue CD and THEN select the cloning function. It always recognizes the external USB2 drive and works properly.

Yesterday, I attached a brand new never-cloned-to hard drive mechanism (using my same old USB2 enclosure) and while running under Windows XP I selected cloning. After the restart, TrueImage8 recognized the attached external USB2 drive and completed the cloning successfully. What a surprise!

Just for the halibut, I decided to try the same thing again after I had run my computer for awhile. I shut down the machine, rebooted and tried to clone to the same external USB2 hard drive mechanism but this time, after the restart, cloning failed with the all-too-familiar message "Error: Disk not found".

Here's my conclusion: Cloning to a never-before-cloned-to hard drive mechanism mounted in an external USB2 enclosure works from within Windows the FIRST time you do it. After that first time, cloning from inside Windows is hit-or-miss (mostly miss) and very frustrating because of the failure to detect the external USB2 hard drive 90% of the time.

I tried the same thing with another brand new never-cloned-to-before hard drive mechanism and it worked the FIRST time but failed on successive attempts. This tells me that TrueImage8 is either writing something to the CLONED-TO hard drive mechanism that makes successive attempts to detect it flakey OR TrueImage8 is retaining something in its own Windows installation that makes any subsequent attempt to clone to that previously cloned-to mechanism flakey.

Food for the Acronis software engineers thought. Start chewing, fellas...... and come up with a long overdue solution, please.

 

Nice bit of detective work there iflyprivate, well done.

Cheers

 

Nice work. I wonder if the drive was wiped completely before you tried to reclone it would that work?

Have you tried using FDISK.EXE (Win98 boot floppy) or WinXP disk management to remove all partitions and then try recloning?

If that doesn't work, wiping the disk completely with a program like Darik's Boot & Nuke might do the job of making it like new. http://dban.sourceforge.net/

 

It's funny you should ask..... great minds think alike and all that.......

I DID clean up one mechanism before I tried to clone to it again by using my XP Pro CD and deleting all its partitions but I did NOT reformat the drive with the XP CD in the interests of time. Maybe that would have made a difference.

Previously I did reformat the mechanism from within Windows but I was unable to remove the hidden diagnostics partition so I then went to the XP CD.

It's the weekend though and I'm taking a break from spending so much time with this intriguing program TrueImage8.

I'll update if I get a chance to do a full reformat and retry cloning from inside Windows XP.

 

Right, lots of great minds here.

Darik's utility creates a small bootable Linux disk, floppy or CD, and it wipes everything. All the partitions, the MBR and the partition table are gone, so it should be as close to a brand new disk as you can get.

 

Alternatively the drive manufacturer probably has a utility that wipes the boot sector / MBR including partition table. That just takes a few secs to run (at least the on from Hitatchi) and might be a quicker test than something that formats the whole disk.

Marc

 

Hello iflyprivate,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis System Cloning Software.

We do appreciate your investigation and will forward it to our Testing Lab where we will try to reproduce the error. This will certainly allow us to find a solution for the problem sooner.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hmm...this evening I tried for the very first time cloning from the USB hard disk. Ran the recovery CD, chose the option without USB support, found the USB hard disk as Local Disk (D, but nothing inside...so couldn't chose the image.

Booted up Windows XP from the HDD again, and installed TrueImage 8.0. Could never restore from Windows becos of "logical disk in use". What's the workaround? Only reboot?

I did reboot and ran the recovery CD again. Chose the option without USB support again. This time it not only detected the USB drive as before, but all the contents inside.

I'm restoring the image now as I type. My fingers are crossed.

 

IT WORKED!!!!! AND IT'S A DK23FB-40 HITACHI TRAVELSTAR!