Unable to clone from USB HD to Laptop

My wife’s work laptop hard drive was failing, it would run for awhile until it got warm and then quit. We bought TI 9, and a 3.5´USB hard drive, did a TI9 clone of the failing hd to the USB drive. Bought a new laptop hd, installed it in the laptop, ran TI9 from the boot up CD and tried cloning from the USB drive to the new drive in the laptop. It ran for hours, never would clone. We tried it many times and every available option in TI9, it would not clone back to the new hd from the USB drive. The old laptop hd was failing, so I installed TI9 on my desktop and tried the above on the desktop, it worked fine, a little slow but it worked. We also reviewed the forums and downloaded the latest version of TI9. My wife needed the laptop for work, so we bought a 2.5” HD USB enclosure and installed the new drive in it, and then cloned the old laptop drive to the 2.5” USB enclosure, it worked the first time and only took maybe 25 minutes. My question after all that, why could we not clone/copy/restore from the USB HD to the new drive in the laptop? It worked on the desktop? We want to use the USB HD as a back-up for the laptop.

 

From what I see in my own tests, cloning is not as reliable as imaging. It requires an extra step, but is worth it. Since you have the devices to test with, make an image of the "old" laptop drive on the external 3.5 inch drive then restore it to the "new" laptop drive.

 

"From what I see in my own tests, cloning is not as reliable as imaging."

I am very interested in your tests and opinions on this issue. Please clarify, as we are making backup decisions now and would like more information.

thanks

 

This test was with a desktop situation so it does not apply to yours. But when the hard drive sizes were vastly different, I could not clone to a usb drive - orig. drive was 2-gig, drive in enclosure was 30-gig. And I tried three different usb enclosures. If the hard drives were equal the cloning was successful. (160 gig to 160 gig were what I tried).

With the first example, 2-gig to 30-gig, if I put the 30-gig in the desktop (I know you will not be able to do this with the laptop), the clone was successful.

If I made an image of the 2-gig to one of my external drives, then restored that image to the 30-gig which was then in the desktop, I got the 30-gig to boot like the 2-gig. This is the scenario that you should try.

 

Hello ejkkj,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please make sure that you use the latest build (2323) of Acronis True Image 9.0 which is available at: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/updates/

To get access to updates you should create an account at:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/
then log in and use your serial number to register your software.

Please uninstall any previously installed build prior to installing build 2323.

Please also create new Bootable Rescue CD after installing the update, boot your PC from this CD and see if the problem still persists.

I would also recommend you to try the "acpi=off noapic" workaround as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

If the problem still persists then please use Bootable Rescue CD created using the latest build (2323) of Acronis True Image 9.0 to create Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Please also create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;
- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;
- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Please keep your external USB hard drive connected while creating Acronis Report and Linux system information.

Please submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov