cloning new hard drive with invisible restore partition

I am cloning a new image from a notebook to an identical hard drive in a USB2.0 enclosure. What is necessary to clone an IBM drive with an invisible restore partition.

Also, do I need to format the drive first. The working partition is NTFS and the invisble partition is Fat32. Ive tried a number of things and always get a error reading the "second sector" on the new drive.

I've tried using XP's disk manager to format as NTFS and then as Fat32 and then I made both paritions to the exact dimensions, and format of the original, all with the same errors. Now i am zeroing out all with IBM's Disk Fitness Test boot disk and zeroing the MBR. Will I have any luck putting the disk, as it will be after a low level format, without formatting, as either NTFS or Fat32, into the enclosure, or is there some other preparation necessary.
thanks for any help,
Bruce

 

Whether you clone to the new drive or whether you choose to create an image of the original drive for later restoration, you MUST select the topmost checkbox when selecting the drive to clone or image from so that all hidden partitons and the complete MBR are captured.

When restoring an image you must do the same - select that topmost checkbox. Acronis should have added a label to this checkbox stating it is for capturing the entire disk and MBR and hidden partitions.

You do not need to format, partition or prepare the destination drive because TrueImage does that for you when cloning to or restoring to.

TrueImage will clone, image and restore both partition types automatically - FAT or NTFS, visible or hidden. You cannot explore or view a hidden partition with TrueImage.

I'm not sure I understand your last paragraph but as I said, you do not have to prepare a destination disk because TrueImage does that as part of the cloning or image restore operation.

Some clarification: If you want to clone your laptop drive to a USB drive you can but then when you restart there will be a conflict because both drives will be identical - XP doesn't handle that well. Do not run with the USB drive attached.

Cloning is usually employed to actually migrate from an old drive to a new drive of a different size where the new drive is then installed in place of the old drive and is used as the running drive. Cloning can, as part of its process, proportionally adjust partition sizes from a small original drive to a larger replacement drive - very convenient.

You can't do that easily when creating an image and restoring it to a new, larger drive. If you create an image from a 40GB drive and restore it to an 80GB drive, you get a 40GB drive with 40GB of unpartitoned space! You'd have to either use another utility to resize the resulting partitions or you'd maybe create a new partition in the unused 40GB space on the 80GB drive.

On the other hand, your question seems to indicate that you are not planning on replacing your original internal hard drive. If that's true, you may not want to clone it as it has no advantage in that case and actually has disadvantages because of potential conflicts with two identical drives with XP on them both connected to your laptop.

Instead, you might want to create a complete image of your internal drive as I described above and store the image on your nice, freshly NTFS-formatted external drive. Because the image will be much smaller than the original 40GB, you can probably store several images and other files on the external drive. You get more bang for your buck that way.

If you have a failure of the internal drive, simply replace it with a new mechanism and boot from your TI Rescue CD and restore the image to it which you had stored on your external USB drive.

By now, you can see there are lots of possible ways to manage backups with True Image. One that jumps out at this point is a hypothetical as follows:

If you cloned to the external USB drive and disconnected it rather than stored an image on it, when you had a failed internal drive you could simply swap mechanisms and you'd be up and running in minutes (except you'd have no more external backup until you replaced the USB drive).

Also, if you cloned to the external drive instead of storing images on it AND you decided to buy a new LARGER internal hard drive, you could quite easily clone from your external 'clone' back to your new larger internal mechanism all in one quick step, and your new partitions would be automatically expanded to fill the bigger drive.

You can see that there are many ways to approach the solution - you'll have to choose what's most comfortable for you.

 

Thanks for the detailed response. What I am doing is cloning the second hard drive to send to our vendor so he has the build for our school laptop purchases. That way we keep the original laptop and just send him the imaged hard drive.
Unfortunately, everytime I try to clone it, the True image program seems to get stuck in the analysis portion of the operation and goes no further. So, what I am doing is putting an image on a third USB2 hard drive, removing the working hard drive, inserting the blank hard drive, then restoring the image from the third external drive. It would have been easier, cloning directly to the hard drive, but that doesn't seem to be my fate.
Bruce