Can I clone an SATA drive to an ATA drive?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by Zephyr77, Sep 17, 2006.

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  1. Zephyr77

    Zephyr77 Registered Member

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    Hello,

    I'm considering the purchase of TI Home but have a question. I've done some searching here but can't seem to find an exact answer. My system drive is currently a Seagate SATA drive (112gb). I'd like to clone it to an external firewire drive as a backup. The external drive is a Maxtor ATA (190gb).

    Can this be done or do I need to have the same type & size drive?

    Thanks!
    Zeph
     
  2. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    I don't think cloning is what you want since, when you try to boot from the external drive, the drive will think it's supposed to be an internal system drive. Win doesn't like to have two system drives and if it boots with two present, it will mark one as system drive and then other will not then be bootable even if the other drive is reomved. That's why, after clongin, you have to shut down the PC and remove one of the drives before rebooting.

    I'm pretty sure that you could clone from SATA to IDE. swap the drives, set the BIOS to boot from the IDE, and then win would start up okay.

    If you want ot keep your current sys drive, then image to the back up drive and resotre the image if you need to.

    Hope that helps.
     
  3. BlueZannetti

    BlueZannetti Registered Member

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    That's often what I've done as the first step in a drive swap, no you don't need a precise match. It just needs to be able to hold the clone (i.e. net occuppied space is important).

    Blue
     
  4. Zephyr77

    Zephyr77 Registered Member

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    Thanks to you both! I meant to say mirror the system drive as a backup not cloning. I just want to be able to restore it if anything happens.

    Zeph
     
  5. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    In that case, piece of cake. ATi doesn't care about the hardware connection, whatver is on one disk, it can copy to image and then copy onto another disk (provided the targetis big enough ;-) ).

    If you use a USB connection, understand that this will be slower than doing a backup/image from one internal to another internal drive -- the average transfer rate on USB being much lower the 480 Mbps (bulk transfer) you see cited.
    But it has its virtues. ;)
     
  6. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello Zephyr77,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

    We are sorry for the delayed response.

    Please note that since you are interested in backing up your hard drive for the disaster recovery purposes, I would recommend you to follow Backup approach as shieber mentioned.

    Clone Disk Tool of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home migrates/copies the entire contents of one disk drive to another while Backup Tool creates a special archive file for backup and disaster recovery purposes.

    Using the Backup approach you will be able to create the image archive and place this image to any supported storage device. So you can place rhe image archive to your external drive.

    Please also take a look at this FAQ article explaining the difference between Clone Disk and Backup approaches in more detail.

    Actually, Clone Disk approach is usually used to upgrade the hard drive (e.g. install a larger disk), while Backup approach is basically dedicated for the complete data backup and disaster recovery purposes.

    As for migrating your operating system from IDE to SATA hard drives or vice versa please take a look at this article.

    You can find more information on how to use Acronis True Image 9.0 in the respective User's Guide.

    We also recommend that you take a look at this article providing the illustrated instructions on Acronis True Image 9.0 Home installation and usage.

    Thank you.
    --
    Aleksandr Isakov
     
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