How Long To Clone?

Got TI-10, and am cloning my C: drive to a new drive.

C: is 250gb, new is 320gb (233gb going to 298gb in the cloning interface)

The cloning operation has been going on for almost 40 hours now, and has been on 99% for at least 18 hours. My disks are still active and the monitor refreshes every once in a while, so the operation is not finished... The source drive does have some problem sectors...

I wonder how long this is supposed to take?? From reading other threads, this seems an unreasonably long time...

Thanks.

 

If you have some bad sectors on the source drive then it could take a loooong time to finish if your lucky. I have imaged and cloned drives over the years with bad sectors and generally have been lucky in getting them to work but I can say that the only product I ever had success in doing this with was Acronis. I tried with Ghost but I never once got a drive with bad sectors to successfully image. I even tried all the Ghost tricks where you can configure it to ignore the bad sectors which does allow the process to complete but ends up with an unusable image or cloned drive which doesn't work. I think the longest time I let one run like that was around 55 hours or so but it did eventually complete and the target drive was functional. I usually only do this with critical clients where fresh install with re-config would be a nightmare. Keep in mind too that the excessive time needed is not the fault of Acronis but rather the bad sectors trying to be read over and over. This would happen with anything trying to read those areas. Good luck and I hope you do have success with it.

 

Well the drive did finish, after about 52 hours, 24 or more of which was indicated at the 99% level. However, it only boots to a windows XP screen with no logon, so there seems to be other issues.

Thanks for your reply, though. At least I know that this is not necessarily an unreasonable period of time.

I'm hoping to get a working clone because as you said with some of your clients, re-installing and re-activating all the software in my case would be a nightmare...

 

It took less than 30 min for me to go from a 40g hard drive to a 160 so there is something wrong with your setup for sure . I'm only new at this so cant help I'm afraid.

 

Did you run a scantest (chkdsk scan and attempt repair) on the source drive before cloning?

 

Sorry to hear in the end the clone wasn't working properly. At this point I can think of two things you can try if you want to. The first is as shieber mentioned in his reply, to try chkdsk /f and see if the source drive can map out these sectors and then try another clone of that drive. It should clone much faster if those sectors can be mapped out.

The other thing is to take the already cloned drive and using the XP install cd, boot from the cd and try to do a repair option during the install. This has worked on occaison for me to repair any hosed system files that because of the bad sectors did not clone over properly. If this does work for you and the system boots up properly again then you should also do the MS update site to see if there are any critical files that need updating as you would have pulled original system files from the boot cd during the repair.

Good luck and let us know how it goes for you.