SATA drive Cloning

I'm trying to turn a SATA HD into my boot drive, changing over from an IDE. A few things came up that I'm curious about.
- During setup for cloning Acronis showed the SATA drive as an IDE. Is that normal?
- full formatting the SATA drive failed (I wasn't present past 50%), but quick format worked. Why might that be? The drive has otherwise passed formatting/setup tests ok.
- Should the cloning of boot drives really work between IDE and SATA with Acronis 11 (demo)? I ask because the SATA drive (after cloning) will not complete startup, but stalls between BIOS and Windows XP, leaving a blank screen except for cursor on the left.

Thanks.

 

Since you're going to run the OS on diff hardware (ie, SATA) maybe you need to install a driver for it before you boot up the OS. Not sure if cloning works with the demo version--restores don't.

 

Restores work but the demo won't create an archive, it has to be created by the time-limited Windows version. Seems this would likely mean cloning wouldn't work since there would be no way to disable it after the demo period however I haven't checked it out.

 

Western Digital does not develop their own drivers; all come from MS in Windows. Acronis says the demo is fully functional. It'd be nice if someone authoritative could verify whether or not the cloning feature works fully. That's why I came to this board. It's not fun doing an XP Repair install for nothing or buying software that doesn't actually fill one of its purposes.

 

Did you disconnect the old IDE drive immediately after the clone process and did not boot into Windows with both the original and clone connected?
If not you could run the clone again making sure that Windows does not see both drives at the same time.
It may be unfortunate that Windows has already been allowed to see the new drive before the cloneing though a fresh cloneing should clear that up.

Another approach if you are still in the trial period would be to make an image of the old drive to a seperate drive or even to a folder on the IDE drive. Then run the restore from the recovery CD which you should have made earlier. Do not boot into Windows until you have disconnected the old drive.

Xpilot

 

I should have clarified my earlier post to say that the cloning is likely not available in the rescue CD mode and likely is in the Windows mode of running TI. The reason is that the Windows demo is time-limited but once the rescue CD is made there is not control on its lifetime which is why the archive creation is disabled.

If you installed the SATA drive and have been using Windows to format it or other operations then the SATA drivers should be installed.

TI does not do drive formatting in the normal sense when it restores or clones an image it just copies over the necessary sectors which includes the file system. I find it troublesome that your formatting failed. The quick format just writes the file system, the full format does a read-check of the disk surface which is why it takes so long. Sounds like it has a problem doing this and I would investigate that before doing anything else.

Try chkdsk X: /r on the disk on all partitions. Substitute the drive letter of the partition being tested for X.

 

Thanks. I did boot directly to the new drive after the cloning, with both IDEs disconnected, but it doesn't quite make it to Windows. Someone on the MSI board suggested the problem is the MBR and the disk ID being wrong. In the Recovery Console, I only ran fixmbr on the IDE drive, not the cloned one, so will give that a shot. Thus, my questions about Acronis giving a 'formatting failed' message on a full format and misidentifying the type of drive may point to the problem. The other person suggested a partition workaround he figured out using BootitNG.

I had written this before your clarification came. I'll run chkdsk.

 

Sata drive shown as IDE(0) Secondary Slave

I am having that same concern with my SATA drives. Obviously, when cloning I want to be sure I am choosing the correct drive as the source. So why does Acronis show my SATA drives as being on the IDE bus? I email tech support about this - (have any of you EVER had a good experience with them? they seem like outsourced know nothings) - and they told me to make sure I had the latest build etc. Not helpful.

So it is the way that windows xp presents the drives, that they appear on the IDE bus? If you look at my attachment of the screen capture, you can see that I have 2 of the same eact drives, so that makes it really hard to figure out which is which.

I think I have concluded that which ever drive is connected to the lower numbered SATA port, shows up int he list as the first drive. i.e. I have 1 drive plugged into sata port # 3 and the other drive into sata port # 4, port 3 shows up in TI as drive 1, and port # 4 shows up as drive 2. But I wish (better visit that wish list post next) that it would indicate the sata port that it is plugged into, and I also wish that it would use the friendly name of the disk from Windows, because I can change that in the registry to indicate which drive is my master and which will be the clone target.

 

Ran chkdsk, but wasn't in front of the computer when it finished. Didn't find anything in Events that suggested a problem, but am running it again just to be sure. Then, assuming good, will repartition and full format with fdisk or the appropriate command.

When partitioning, the user is asked whether to set up as a boot or storage drive. In this case, i.e., before cloning the bootable IDE drive, which should I choose?

 

Re: Sata drive shown as IDE(0) Secondary Slave

Yes, on a Sata system I have, the drive is shown as being on an IDE bus ... just another of the many oversights in the programming.
About distinguishing the identical drives, the only suggestion I have is to temporarily connect a different drive and see how the two are then displayed.

 

It doesn't matter because your clone ends up being an identical duplicate of the source drive. Partitioning and formatting does nothing for you because it all gets overwritten.

 

Re: Sata drive shown as IDE(0) Secondary Slave

May not be the fault of TI. I have a Rev 0 Asus P5LD2 and if you looked in the BIOS your first impression would be that the drives were IDE rather than SATA.

 

Re: Sata drive shown as IDE(0) Secondary Slave

I would recommend you to boot from Acronis True Image bootable rescue media created with the latest build of True Image. Please also make sure that you have your SATA drives in native mode instead of IDE one.

As for identifying them you can do it according hard drive partitions layout and data on them.

 

I also tried booting from the rescue media. in that case the names and models of the drives were not even shown, which makes me think TI get's it's disk drive information from the Windows OS.

Hwo do I make sure my SATA drives are in native mode? They have no visible jumpers on them. And my BIOS definately shows them as being connected on the SATA ports, and no IDE drives.

And the partition layout was my last resort, I just expected a little more of a user friendly help at that point. I.e. if I had my intern clone a machine, and he overwrote the master hard drive because he chose the wrong drive due to a bad interface design, who would I kick first, acronis, my intern, or myself?

 

Even thought the SATA drives drivers are in windows, windows does not know that it needs to install them as it fails before OS load. You need to boot from a windows cd choose install and do an upgrade repair so that it will re-detect the SATA drivers for windows. Also, it is not the drive that needs the driver, but the SATA controller on the MB so you may need to download those and have them to boot into windows if windows does not have them. IF you use the corporate version with universal restore it will do the detect for you and allow you to put in the drivers.

 

Hello genegold,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that cloning from Windows is available in the trial version of Acronis True Image 11 Home. However, as pointed by Xpilot, it's not recommended to let Windows see the drive before moving system to it. Please see this article for details and solutions. You may also try deleting all partitions from target drive before initiating cloning process (to avoid Windows assigning a letter to the drive).

If the issue persists, please collect some information to let us investigate it thoroughly:

Please create Acronis Report as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Please keep both drives in question connected and powered on during the creation process.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Hello stevewa,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that you can identify the drives by partition labels on them (you can see the labels in the partition layout below the list of drives, for example, in your screenshot the partition (U has a label "Data").

Could you please let us know your Acronis request number (e.g. [Acronis #123456]) which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter? We will find out how the investigation of your issue is going. If you have not received an autoreply then please send us a Private Message containing your e-mail address.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Wow, the Goodells article is excellent, just what I've been looking for. Needs wide circulation. It jibes with the experience of another fellow who used nBootIt to correct the DiskID error in MBR with a SATA drive. Since I've recently done drive letter changing in the registry and also have a Win98 diskette, this should go well. It'll be interesting to see if there's any merit to the claim made on another group that SATA drives require MOBO drivers be installed, and that's the problem going from IDE to SATA.

I appreciate Acronis' willingness to investigate further. I do hope they take to heart what's been said in this thread about program errors in identifying SATA drives as such.

 

Win98 diskette worked, creating perfect transition so far. SATA issue seems to have been a red herring, the problem being DiskID in the Master Boot Record entirely.