TI 11 Clone Help Please

Sure, here is a link to a screenshot at my Flickr account...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tommytechnology/2468105541/sizes/o/

Drive 2 (D is merely the cloned version of Drive 1 (C... After you perform a Cloning operation, TrueImage 11 names the secondary drive the same as the original - so it started off life named Drive-1 but with drive letter D. I then renamed it to Drive-2 .

Will post a screenshot of the opposite scenario... i.e. booting from Drive-2 by turning off the computer and merely swapping the SATA cables around. That will be later tonight or so, since I need to be at a point in today's work flow where I can take the time to shut off the computer!

 

For those having trouble viewing the above attachment, this is a smaller version.

 

TommyTechnology,

Thanks for the screen shot. You have 17 GB of data in Drive-1 and 13 GB of data in Drive-2. I'm interested to see the next screen shot.

 

Sorry for the delay, here's the screenshot (modified to fit inside topic as GroverH did to my first one - BTW, thanks for that too).

 

Tommy, in the second screen shot you have 17 GB of data in Drive-1 and 13 GB of data in Drive-2. The same numbers as the first screen shot. Drive-1 contains the page file (and maybe the hibernation file) so that probably accounts for the 4 GB difference.

The 466 GB HD is booting as D: drive. What happens if you disconnect the smaller HD from the motherboard? Does the larger HD still boot? I suspect it may not but I'd be interested to know.

You mentioned 30 GB on one HD. Where has it gone?

Thanks for the info.

 

Yes, the 30GB - that’s how much Windows Vista Ultimate had on this drive after installing Ultimate fresh and running the installer programs for all my important software I use every day (PhotoImpact, PSP X2, Office 2007, Dreamweaver CS3, yada, yada...). Then I made a TI-11 backup image to the second hard drive, which I then moved off that drive afterward to an external.

Now, after that first backup, and once the new built up software layers looked nice, I ran the Vista Disk Cleanup tool provided by MS and have the system remove aprox 12GB of fluff (all the built up Vista Restore Points, Temp Directory installer files), and since I am running 3GB of RAM, I also go into Virtual Memory and reduce the swap file to only a fixed size 16MB (yes, that’s just megabytes) from the 3GB variable sized file that Vista had originally assigned (with mucho RAM you do not need Virtual Memory, but setting it to zero the system runs slower than if you just set it to the tiniest size MS allows). Finally, I run CCleaner to remove any other junk that the MS Disk Cleanup tool was too timid to want to tackle.

The resulting system is about 17GB as you see, then I made the Clone onto the second hard drive (overwriting everything, hence the reason that the Image Archive of the 30GB system had to be transferred to an external HDD first). That’s how Drive-2 came into existence.

Now, to be a good scientist, I must point out that the contents of the two drives you are seeing in these screenshots is no longer "squeaky clean identical" since obviously I may have downloaded a few small files here and there, and made changes to My Documents here and there - but they are certainly "close enough for government work" and for this thread, and of course do not equal the nearly 4GB difference that you see between the two drives.

One thing I also noticed about the second screenshot was how Vista reported everything. The top section still shows the two drives in the same order, D1 first and D2 second, but with the one difference that the words "System Boot" and "Crash Dump" moved down from D1 to D2 between the two screenshots. But it is in the bottom section that Vista reports what is actually attached to the controller of Disk 0, and the controller of Disk 1, and here is where you can see more clearly that the boot order was changed. Also note that the Page File is still on C, Vista does use the clone’s Page File, even though there clearly would be one to use if it wanted to, but instead consults the registry and uses the one that had been assigned from Drive-1 (C) even though Drive C got shuffled around a bit - I found that interesting.

You also asked "What happens if you disconnect the smaller HD from the motherboard?" I will test that later today and let you know what happens, particularly what happens to the Page File usage.

BTW, I have all hibernation turned off... this is a desktop system that gets used for 14 hours a day, is almost never turned off, and I do not want my systems to power down if I get on a long phone call.

TT

 

TT:

Pardon for jumping in here, but is your question related to why the 4 GB difference in size between the two Vista installations? If so, one explanation may be Vista's System Restore points/Shadow Copy files created automatically by VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service). If there were any of these on the original drive then they would have been copied to the clone. On first boot, Windows would have determined that they did not belong to the current disk (because it has a new disk ID) and would have reacted by deleting them. Over time, the daily shadow copy task would begin building them up again on the new disk.

If the shadow copy files were 4 GB on the source disk then that would explain why the clone became 4 GB smaller in size. You can have a look at their size using the VSSADMIN command. Start an elevated command prompt by right-clicking on CMD.exe and choosing "Run as administrator". Enter the following command:

Code:

vssadmin List ShadowStorage

to see how much space is being used for shadow copies and system restore points. Compare the size on each of your two Vista disks to confirm whether this is the underlying cause.

 

I have shadow copy turned off. There is only one recent System Restore Point remaining after running MS Disk Cleanup. Since no new software was installed after cloning, the clone and the original should have the same single System Restore Point in them. I ran your suggested command on just the original (which is live and in use right now as I type this) and got the following reply:

"No items found that satisfy the query."

So, now I am puzzled, and ran chkdsk on C then again on D and both report the allocation unit size to be 4096 - not the way I had speculated (I had speculated there was going to be two different cluster sizes).

OK, any Uber Techie, or Acronis support folks, this is for you to explain: If a user uses the Disk Cloning option in TI-11, ends up cloning a 320GB SATA 3.0 drive to another SATA 3.0 500GB drive, sets TI to use proportional cloning, assume the cluster (allocation unit) size is the same on both drives, and immediately after the cloning process (upon rebooting) the new 500GB drive shows that just under 4GB less space is used to store the "exact same number of files" on this clone - then what exactly is TI-11 not moving over to the new "clone"?

Inquiring minds want to know!!!

TT

 

TT:
System Restore on Vista uses VSS, so if you had one restore point on the source drive then it would not survive when cloned. The reason for this is that TI does not restore sectors to the identical locations on the destination drive, and the VSS mechanism keeps track of differential changes to sectors. When the clone boots for the first time, Vista will recognize that the sector map is no longer valid and your restore point will get deleted.

I don't have TI 11 to check this but I suspect that if you create a "sector-by-sector" clone of the drive then VSS files may survive imaging/cloning. With the normal TI mechanism, VSS files will not survive.

I still suspect that this is the reason for the size difference you see. The first restore point after an update will be huge, so 4 GB is not surprising. Can you check both Vistas to see how many restore points are on each disk? Or, if you turn off system restore on both Vistas then you should see the sizes reported on both drives to be about the same. You could also check the sizes of the paging files to see if they are the same on both Vistas.

TI will not change the cluster size. It had better not because Vista's new boot manager (bootmgr) will not work with cluster sizes larger than 4 kB (it will not boot).

 

Since we are all curious, I will turn off System restore, reboot once to be sure the change took place, then run a new fresh clone, then check the sizes again.

That should enlighten us fully - agreed?

 

TT:

That sounds like a very good idea. Let's see what happens.

 

Mark,

I haven't run a test on that, but I doubt the image method would work (don't know about the cloning). If I remember correctly, a Sector-by-Sector backup and restore of a Vista created partition didn't keep the 2048 offset. In that case, I don't see how it would keep any VSS files. However, if the partition off is already non-Vista, then it may keep them.

 

OK, so I am guilty of an ID10T error.

Experimentation is complete – I re-ran Disk Cleanup and also tried to turn off System Restore (but found that I had already done so) and ran Defrag, and even removed my Data folder to a remote HDD so I could reduce the size of the actual system (programs and Windows Vista only). Whole thing came to 12.9GB. Ran the cloning and low and behold the cloned system was also 12.9GB (only off by a few MB’s which could easily be attributed to various "always changing" system files).

Moral of the story: Don’t trust that TommyTechnology character for information about how many GB’s of files are on his system, clearly he loses mental track of changes he might have made.

What IS COOL about all of this experimentin' is the cloning itself. I inserted the BootCD version of TI-11, ran the cloning (manual mode – proportional expansion), and watched in glee as it completed the task in just about 3 minutes (this is the first time I have cloned such a small Vista system as I usually have a Data folder with mucho various data in it).

This totally blows away all the backups I was making by having TI-11 create an image archive of my live system onto an external 2.5 inch USB 2.0 HDD, which often took about 2 hours (of course, those systems were typically 20GB in size, so they would not be cloned so fast either, certainly not the 3 minutes I got this time, but probably still under 10-11 minutes.)

That cloning time is the only time you cannot use your computer. Once the cloning is done and you have booted into Windows, you can now go and use the Internet and all of your daily essentials like normal and have TI create an Image Archive of your system – but not an Image Archive of the LIVE C Drive that has strategic open files that we all secretly worry about TI having trouble handling – no, instead you can have TI run an archive creation of the "now sleeping" cloned version of your system, which has no open strategic operating system files to worry about. Be honest, how many of you try not to do too much with your system when TI is running a backup of your live C drive while you are also still using it?

And that cloned Drive image archive creation goes very fast, too, if you happen to have dual 7200 RPM drives, figure about 10 minutes there as well. Of course you then finally will want to transfer the image (which is likely somewhere on Drive C), off of Drive C, to an external someday, which is another 10 minutes.

Yes, I realize my way is three steps and a bit complicated to keep track of… but my own personality is such that I will gladly exchange time for complexity any day - since complexity goes away with increased usage and familiarity, but time - when it goes away - is just gone...

TT

 

Tommy,

I'm very interested to know if your large HD will boot when it's the only HD attached to the MB.

I'm concerned about your system. Your D: drive is a clone of the C: drive and its registry will contain numerous references to the C: drive. For example, when the large HD is the boot drive and you run Office or other third-party programs that record some configuration changes in the registry and some in your user profile in the "Documents and Settings" folder, guess which "Documents and Settings" folder is used. The one on the smaller HD, the C: drive. This crosstalk isn't ideal and leads to a "schizophrenic" system. It's analogous to this entry from Dan Goodell....

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

 

Thank you for your concern - but I had already tested that option, and also ran it again tonight so I can give you folks a screenshot of it.

Basically Vista is smarter than XP, it sees just one drive that is marked as Active and it goes and reassigns the drive letter from D to C, and gives it a 20MB Page File of its own. You notice there is a hole where D was. Applications know nothing of the switcheroo.

BTW, that Canon drive is an SD card I leave in my Canon printer at all times, that way it always can have a name associated with it (when the slot is empty then Vista calls it a Removable Drive, which can get confusing if I install a bunch of removable drives for some project).

When I re-inserted the second SATA cable for Drive-1 again and rebooted, the system went back to labeling Drive-1 as C and labeling Drive-2 as D, and also went back to using the Page File on C (Drive-1).

 

Tommy, thanks. That's good news.

 

TT:

You might want to troubleshoot this further. Using "Live Imaging" to an internal HDD you should be able to achieve rates of about 3 GB/min, and to an external USB 2.0 drive you should see about 1 GB/min for fairly modern hardware.

Right after upgrading to Vista SP1 I noticed that the transfer rate to my external USB 2.0 hard disk had increased from 19 MB/sec to 29 MB/sec, so there have been some recent improvements courtesy of Microsoft.