Image vs. clone?

OK. I have had a really unpleasant time trying to clone an old drive so I can replace it. I've read the thread sections regarding the apparently known problem reading a USB external drive, tried the suggested fixes with no luck. So my question is do I really need to clone the drive to an external (and new) disk? When XP is fully loaded, it has no problem reading the USB drives. Can I use Create Image to create the image on another USB Drive; insert the new partitioned drive in the laptop; boot up with the TI Rescue Disk; then restore the external USB image onto the new (blank) HD?

If it fails to read the USB drive with the image on it, can I do it across a network to the HD on another computer? My thinking is the problem is somehow with the Dell notebook USB port; that TI should read it OK either connected to my newer USB 2 desktop computer or I can even put the image on its C drive to be restored to the laptop C drive.

Hope that makes sense. I'd really like to get this out of the way and have been trying to fix the clone problem for over 6 hours now. A bit frustrating. Sigh... . I'm using TI 8.0 build 826.


Thanks!

George

 

Wait, wait: How about this (my mind is extremely mushed out, so I just need someone who knows what they're doing and thinking semi-clearly so I don't get bogged down in another frustrating loop...):

1) Pull the old hardrive from my notebook and put it in the external USB enclosure.
2) Plug that into my desktop USB 2 port
3) Create an image of the old drive onto my C drive on the desktop.
4) Plug the new drive into the desktop port and restore the image from C to USB.
5) Put that restored drive into notebook as new C drive.

How's that sound?

Thanks again.

G.

 

George, both approaches sound OK to me. I use images to set up a new HD, rather than "clones".

Brian

 

Call me a worrier but I like to clone as follows vs. moving images:

1) Put the brand new unformatted hard drive in my external USB case and connect it to the laptop.
2) Boot the laptop with the Recovery CD and clone the internal drive to the new external in the USB case.
3) When complete, swap drives and reboot with the new internal drive and wipe the old drive in the USB case.

I don't trust the image and restore process when you're restoring to a different drive than the one the image was made from. Every time I do it and run checkdisk it picks up screwy index files or the restore fails because of a read error from the source drive where the image is stored. The source drive has aready been checked as okay and the image has verified okay but I still get the read errors. I even tried different storage drives and different USB enclosures with similar problems. Cloning always works for me.

What I'd like to know is:

1) When restoring to a different drive than the image was created from, how does TrueImage 8 know to avoid a bad sector on the DESTINATION drive if its snapshot map of the SOURCE drive says "put the data in that sector"? Is TI8 that smart?

2) Is there ANY difference at all in the process of moving data that TI8 follows when cloning vs. image-restore action? If so what?

 

Iflyprivate:

Yes, that's what I tried to do originally, but the drive will not clone either running TI from XP (on reboot: Error: Drive not found or ERROR: Partition changed) or, when running from the TI Rescue CD: ERROR: a second drive is needed to clone (it's not finding the USB drive with only the TI drivers loaded).

On another thread, you and others had suggestions for workarounds but, as noted, don't work for me, alas.

So anyway, I'll just try it and hope for the best. Tech Support doesn't seem to be coming up with a solution.

Brian K.: Thanks! I'll report success or problems.

George

 

OK! That worked great with only one small glitch. I must have missed a step or option. I restored the image to the new 60GB HD, installed it in the notebook and it booted fine. However, the file size of C is the original 10GB and I've got the rest as an unallocated partition. I'd like to extend the C partition into the rest of the drive for a total of 56 (or whatever...). How do I do that? It's a FAT32 drive.

Also, what should I run to map the new bad sectors? (Win XP).

Thanks again!

George

 

George, use Partition Magic or something similar to make your C: drive the full drive size or do the imaging again, making sure the whole drive is used. I can't recall the option at present.

Brian

 

George,

From another thread here's an idea:

When you restore a whole disk (all partitions) from an image, you can't adjust the sizes. However, if you restore only one of the partitions, you can adjust the amount of disk space it uses.

Having restored the whole disk which makes the system bootable and the Dell utilities available, I believe, repeating the restore and selecting only the C drive partition from that same image will allow it to be expanded to use the rest of the drive.
__________________
John