Why remove old hard disc after cloning?

Hi

I wish to make a cloned exact replica backup of the hard disc I use in my karaoke laptop, so that if the HD crashes, I have a backup disc that I can slot in to carry on with the show.

I'm just reading through the documentation before I start, and it says that in auto mode, I must remove the old hard disc after cloning. Why is this? Does the cloning affect or change the source disc in any way? i just want to clone it so I have two hard drives exactly the same.

Also, just want to make sure that I can clone to an external USB drive.

Cheers

Tommo

 

Tommo,

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

Acronis TI seems to be able to successfully ignore this rule on my test computers.

As you are cloning a laptop, I suggest you do a reverse clone with the old HD in the USB external enclosure and the new HD in the laptop. You need to boot from the Acronis TI CD. It's more reliable than a standard clone procedure. You can switch HDs after confirming success.

 

Thanks Brian

Thant info fried my little brain a bit, but as long as I can clone the way you mention, it shouldn't be a problem I would think.

So the way you describe, I'm guessing that requires a boot disc of some sort, since the new HD in the lappy will have no data on it?

Cheers

 

Yes. Make a TI boot disk from the menu choice in All Programs.

After the reverse clone procedure just unplug the USB HD and boot from the new HD.

 

The reason you don't want to bootup the computer with 2 identical c: drives connected is because it might make both drives unbootable in a worst case scenario.

In your situation, I would make sure and test the clone drive before you actually need to use it. Even if you follow all the steps correctly, you can't assume the clone drive will bootup the first time. It's best to plan for the worst. I never get dissapointed with true image because I know it's limitations and how to fix them.

If you are using windows xp, you might want to consider getting a "boot corrector". It's a utility that can fix drive letter problems quickly. It's the difference between doing a clone all over again or just a simple 5 minute fix. Especially if having an unworkable computer is not an option. I'm one of the few people in these forums that actually prefers to fix the restored drive quickly versus spending hours or days trying to get a clone to work.

One more thing is never let the source windows xp see the hard drive that it will be restored on. For instance if windows xp has seen the external drive, the drives ID will be noted on the windows xp registry. When restored that will cause drive letter problems, it's always good to avoid them in the first place.

 

Windows will tolerate only one system disk and one boot disk, usaully both are the same disk. If you have two identical such disks installed when you boot, windows will mark only one of them as boot and as system disk and the other as not, usually the first one it gets to is marked as both system and boot disk and the other is marked as neither, but sometimes it will mark one as system and one as boot. In either case, one of the disk will no longer be bootable from then on. The way around this is to remove one of the disks after cloning before you boot again. If you don't, both disks will contain all the same files but you won't be able to boot with one of the disks. It's a problem that won't show up until you try to boot with the disk no longer marked as a system/boot disk.