Cloned a disk and now system hangs

Hi there....

Not very happy at the moment as I've just had to spend 15 hours reformatting my hard drive and re-installing windows XP plus all my program files manually as your program did not help me. In fact it hurt me and rather than help me keep my system safe it's done just the opposite and has been as damaging as a virus - hence the reformat and reinstall of my whole system.

Now let me explain.

I had a stable system and wanted to clone my disk just to make sure I had a instant ready to go backup in the event of a sytem crash or falliure.

So, I clone the main C: disk

Here's how it went.

Which disk do you want to clone. C:

Which disk to you want to clone to. E:

We need to remove the Partition. Press ok. yes, I pressed it on the E: drive

we now need to reboot. Yes, are you sure, yes. sure do I did

Reboot. waiting, waiting waiting. Nothing happend once past the windows splash screen. It just stayed blank. Tried to boot again. Still nothing.

no problem I thought.

Clone dose not work for some reason but I can just use windows repair and get the system back.

Windows repair did not work either.

So; the only choice I had was to go out and buy another drive and put windows back on again and then manaully copy over all my files like Outlook pst files and address books etc. It took 15 hours of hard work to get the system back.

Now as you can imagine I've gone out and purchased Geni-Soft to do the back up which I've just done now but I would still like to be able to clone a disk once in a whlile

To be honest I suspect the True Image software is a little too difficult for me to understand as I'm sure I did something wrong - though I did follow the instructions.

Any help would be much appriciated.

My instinct is the software maybe a bit buggy? Not sure. Anyway, at least it does not like my hardware or something - hence the way it failled.

 

You didn't state which version and build number of TI you used. But whichever one, I suspect you ran TI from within Windows and you're one of the unlucky ones where it didn't work right.
Create the bootable Rescue CD and run your TI procedures from the CD. That way there's nothing running in the background when you do your Cloning.

 

Peter Wilding,

I've made lots of clones on a test computer, using TI from Windows. I really tried hard to make it fail but I couldn't. I cloned onto a partitioned HD, an empty HD and a HD that had a zeroed track 1. The clone function is very robust and easy to use. I was impressed.

Sorry, I don't know where you went wrong.

 

I think what happened is you rebooted without shutting down and disconnecting the old drive. You have to disconnect the original drive and make the newly cloned drive the master. See this link for an explanation and possible solutions. http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

 

Tom, I think that was one of the tests that I did and TI passed the test. I couldn't make it fail. I mean to discuss this with Dan Goodell as both of Dan's rules didn't apply to TI. The rules certainly apply to Ghost 9 and 10 but these apps clone into a partition which isn't how TI works.

If you have a test computer I'd be interested to hear if you get the same results as I obtained.

 

Tom, I checked my notes and I did do that test. The master HD contained C: and D: drives. I cloned to a slave HD, left the HDs untouched and rebooted. The slave HD showed as E: and F: drives. The master HD was then removed and the slave was made the master. It booted normally as C: but I didn't record the drive letter of the second partition.

I was surprised.

 

Well, I can say that I seem to get the same results as you Brian. Many cloned drives, never an issue, nor can I imagine how there would be. In fact, all of my cloning has occurred on multiboot systems with the second physical drive identified as a boot option. I haven't had problems there either.

Blue

 

Thanks for confirming my results, Blue. I'll let Dan Goodell know.