Disk Cloning Nightmare

Having recently purchased a licensed copy of TI9 I was mildly dismayed to find that I have to pay for technical support by phone if I want to try and resolve any issues that can't wait. Way to screw more money out of your users Acronis !!

Anyway, enough moaning and onto the problems I am having. A lady brought a laptop in complaing that it wouldn't boot up etc and there were error messages on the screen. She is running Windows XP and I successfully booted into SAfe Mode then I ran a couple of tests (as suggested by the POST) and the tests show the hard drive is about to fail so I told her I could clone her disk to a new laptop hard drive using your software and she should be good to go.

I took the failing laptop drive out of her machine and installed it as the Secondary IDE Master in my test pc (which is running Win2k Pro). I then installed a new Toshiba 40Gb laptop drive as the Primary IDE Slave (after a whole bunch of messing around with jumper configurations trying to get the bios to see all three drives). Finally I got the Win2k machine to boot up and see all 3 drives...what joy !

I fired up Acronis TI9 in standalone mode and told it to clone the failing drive to the new drive and preserve the data on the failing drive when it was done. I left the machine on overnight and returned this morning to find the 'Congratulations, you have successfully cloned your disk...' or words to that effect. The instructions finished by saying something like 'hit any key to reboot' which I did and the pc shut down but did not restart.

I removed the 'Good' laptop drive from my test pc and put it into the laptop whereupon it told me that no operating system was present. In fact further investigation shows that the 'Good' drive will no longer even spin up. On top of that my 160Gb Western Digital drive that has Win2K loaded on it cannot be seen at all by any of the machines I have running.

So, prior to running TI9 I had two good drives and one failing drive and post running TI9 I have one failing drive, one completely dead drive, and one drive that spins up but isn't seen as being connected to any machine that I have tried it with.

Was it me that screwed up or was it the software ?

I have created a floppy as per the instructions in the sticky to recover the MBR and will try that with the 160 Gb drive but in the meantime I would appeciate it if anyone could tell me if I missed out something important in the overall procedure or is Acronis prone to killing drives. Thx in advance,

 

I'm not going to try to understand why the software would do that to your drives, if indeed it did. But you obviously have resources for fixing computers, so here's how I would have tried to resolve the initial problem.

With an external drive connected to the laptop, boot the laptop with the bootable TI Rescue CD.

Create an Image Backup (not Clone) of the laptop drive on to the external drive.

Remove the laptop drive, install the new 40 gig drive, again boot with the TI bootable CD then Restore the Image from the external to the 40 gig.

 

After cloning the old drive should have been removed from the PC before the first successful boot.

See the following link:

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

Method #3 ("Kawecki's Trick") is an easy one to try if you have a W95/98 startup diskette.

 

Hi guys and thanks for the replies...good advice and a very good resource site for future reference. Tomorrow the fight begins anew...the MBR fix didn't actually work so it looks like the Western Digital is dead and buried...got a new laptop hard drive being delivered tomorrow so we'll see what happens. Thanks again for taking the time to post.