My experience cloning first of two hard drives.

I have used True Image to clone a new hard drive, that is I have replaced the FIRST of TWO hard drives in my system (WinXP+SP2) and copied the old drive to the new. It had two partitions, C and D. I had success with that (after one false start, see below), but when I reinstalled the SECOND hard drive back where it was originally Windows did not see the drive. This second hard drive also had two partitions, E and F. Device Manager showed the drive OK, but the partitions had "lost" their drive letters and therefore did not appear in My Computer etc. Big worry for several hours as I tried to find help and support in forums and all over the place.

The solution is simple and much nearer at hand. Bring up the Help and Support Centre from say Control Panel - Help (menu item), UNCHECK Search only Control Panel, type in the search term "drive letter" and click the green arrow, select "Assign, change or remove a drive letter" from the results, then in the right pane expand "Using the Windows interface" and follow those steps. Easy when you know already.

My two hard drives were both on one EIDE channel, one jumpered as master and the other as slave (of course). I removed the second hard drive from the system (the E and F one) and put the new drive in its place in order to do the cloning, observing the usual requirements with regard to master and slave jumpers. The first drive used FAT32 and the second NTFS. Yes, I know they should have been both NTFS, but at the time of originally setting them up I kept some options open (eg reverting to Win98se).

The only problem in actually cloning the first hard drive was after deciding new partition sizes in True Image cloning module and rebooting to put the cloning into effect I got an error message saying that a hard drive was not found. Huge anxiety at that point, but after starting again from the top everything went well the second time. Good luck all you newbies, and don't forget you may have to assign drive letters to your non-booting drive(s) after you have finished cloning your boot drive. It's a Windows thing.

 

Sure, in windows mind the E and F disks were on the IDE Slave drive, and by the time you said "Acronis", they was no more slave!

Your friend is "Computer Management" then Disk Management, then affect letter or whatsoever...

Good job, you kept cool and all went well..

Btw you can "Convert" your FAT32 to NTFS at startup time without losing (too much) data. Only kidding! no change appart from filesystem!

Welcome to Acronis' World!

Jaycee

 

Thanks Jaycee. I had the boot drive (C and D partitions) jumpered as master more or less instinctively, but did not realise is was mandatory to do so. Other new chums will also appreciate your help.