Cloning Woes....

Over the weekend it looked like my may HD started to go wonky. I am running Vista and used Disk Director to partition it into 5 partitions.

On reboots chkdsk would kick in every time complaining about different partitions, ultimately it would abort when trying to modify the MFT, saying "not enough space." Bleh. Totally bogus as there was plenty of space. So I thought that the drive was likely bad and decided to upgrade.

I installed the second drive, both are SATA, and ran the trial version of TI on it, cloning my old drive. Upon reboot, I now had two drives with identical partitions: The old one was C,D,E,H,I. The new drive started at K.

All seemed well. Now "obviously" all I needed was to remove the old drive, and boot under the new one.

(hear the sound of screeching breaks).

The PC would no longer boot. (Yes I did turn off the old drive in the boot-config panel, so it no longer looks for it).

It claimed it couldn't find one of the system files in C. Well, golly, I thought the new boot partition was K, why the gorram H*ll should it be still looking on C?

So I renamed K to C, and now it seemed to work. I then renamed all of the other partitions, but those didn't take, after endless reboot/BSOD cycles, it finally got things sorted out, but the other partitions still retained their old names.

On the cloning operation, since I was going from a smaller drive (250G) to a larger one (320G), it expanded the partition sizes. Except on one: I had a 100G partition for media stuff. The cloned version was ALSO 100G.

I still haven't exhausted all combinations of this, but both TI and DD seem to be unreliable, and I just may punt, reformat everything and start with a fresh install of Vista. Sigh. Unless anyone has any other suggestions.

 

XP can only manage a maximum of four primary partitions. I wonders if the same constraints apply to Vista?

Xpilot

 

It sounds like you let Windows look at both drives after cloning. It's a well known problem.

After a cloning, you must shut down and remove the original drive before restarting in Windows. After that you can boot with the new clone. It will have the drive letters of the original drive and boot properly.

 

Sometimes yo have to set the boot priority order in the BIOS -- unless you connnect the clone to the same connection the cloned drive used to be on.