TI 11 hangs on boot before Disk Clone

Running TI 11 Home. Thinkpad, XP Pro SP3, 320gb SATA drives. Trying to clone drive from main onto drive in ultraqbay. Have done several successful clones already. But suddenly it will not run - on the boot before copy, sysem hangs on driver loads.

System will not boot again unless I select "restore last known good configuration". Note sent to Acronis support but no response so far. Any ideas?

 

There are two methods to clone:
Are you doing this online (Windows running) or in Recovery Mode (Windows not running)?

You could try the other method and see if you experience the same problem.

 

Because I am cloning the C drive, windows cannot be running, so I am doing in 'recovery' mode. It's not really practical to load another windows system and then use that to clone the main system disk. Acronis must be doing something to make the system unbootable.
I ran a chkdsk of the drive (which also runs in 'recovery' mode) - this ran fine

 

For the record it can. I've done it when one of my friends wanted to upgrade his HD to a larger capacity without the whole new hard drive migration process. I did it online. Placed the bigger capacity hd in an enclosure and attached it via USB. Acronis saw 2 physical drives attached to the system. Of course I had to install Acronis on his current HD and then started the cloning online.

Sorry can't really get what you mean.

 

I am trying to clone the whole drive to an identical drive. You suggest I could do this 'on-line' within Windows, but I cannot see how to do this, and I'd have thought that to do a proper clone, the drive needs to be quiesced / locked (i.e not being used by anything). Acronis locks the drive and tries to re-boot but clearly is loading different drivers because it simply hangs. How can I clone the main boot drive from within windows when windows is runnig. Alternatively, any ideas how I find out what is hanging on the re-boot. Safe mode just list all the drivers up till MUP.SYS (but this is always the last driver to be displayed, and almost certainly not causing the hang.)

Reported to Acronis support a week ago, but sadly, no response from them.

 

Clone or Restore using Resize comparison
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1299861&postcount=9

Check the comments listed in the link pointing to other links.

It is best that you clone when booted from the TI Rescue CD and the new blank unformatted drive be installed in the normal boot position. Old drive can be in ultrabay. After boot, disconnect old drive before first bootup following clone.

As you will see from the write-up, my recommendation is to an image restore rather than clone.

 

Thanks, and I appreciate the advice, but..
I clone because I am on the road all the time, and laptop drives have a habit of failing if you knock the system. A cloned drive can be slipped into the boot bay, and incremental recovery done from a pcexpress card to which I save each night on schedule. The whole recovery takes less than 5 minutes... and I can't usually afford to sit around for several hours while the system rebuilds from a backup image. I carrry the latest clone with me, and have 2 others which i rotate at home and in the office). I'm not sure I understand why cloning a hard drive would ruin it if all you are doing is copying data from it.

Also, you suggest booting from CD (which would be in the ultradrive bay) >>and<< copying to the spare hard disk (which would also have to be in the ultradrive bay). Physically juggling drives is a p.i.t.a. and likely to introduce physical issues even more.

And we are missing the point.. all I am trying to resolve is why / what TI-11 does before/when it tries to boot [from a virtual drive without the windows shell?] in order to do the clone. This used to work, is supposed to work, but suddenly stopped working. What is more, it renders the system unbootable [at all] (presumably making temporary registry / config changes) . If I could find out what changes it makes, perhaps I could find out what is causing the boot hang.

Again, thanks, especially if someone can help explain the boot problem.

 

TrueImage can create a usb acronis bootable flash drive which can be used in place of the Restore CD. If you feel safe enough with your redundacy, you could clone from ultrabay to primary drive having booted from the flashdrive.

Some of the forum posters clone routinely but be careful of the options to protect your data. Cloning is certainly possible but just not as safe as imaging.

 

yeomans,

I understand your technique formerly worked but now it doesn't so our usual explanation for an IBM clone failure may not apply. Even so, could you let us know the CHS geometry of the internal HD and the UltraDrive Bay HD when you get a chance? How does the UltraDrive Bay connect to your computer? Is it USB? I've never seen one.

If you have a HD in the UltraDrive Bay, does that mean you don't have a CD drive?

 

In case support are monitoring this, my ticket number is 1743936.
Ultradrive is native SATA connect for a SATA drive, but will accept other disc carrier for IDE disk / CD... very slick. But - you are correct.. HD in Ultrabay = no CD drive.
Dive Geometry of source.. WD 320Gb C=41345, H=240,S=63
Drive geometry of destination is Toshiba 325GSX (same Geometry).

I might try USB stick boot. Cumbersome, but if it works..

I have 3 old clones that worked, and plenty of drives, so can run diags of work / not work if that helps. The log file does not seem to log clone activity. Again.. how can I identify what ATI is doing to the startup config parameters - if we knew that we might be able to do some proper diagnosis.

fwiw, I work for a very large IT firm - am happy/capable to do some more in-depth analysis to fix this.

 

yeomans,

Thanks for providing that information. So quickly. I'm as confused as you about why it doesn't work anymore.

Does this refer to the "old" HD? The "new" HD won't boot and hangs on driver loading?

A standard answer. Could you check your RAM with memtest86+ ? It's weird.

 

Thanks Grover and Brian for guidance.
I have managed to create a bootable USB stick using methods described elsewhere on this forum. When I do this, Acronis works, and I can clone the disk. So for now, I am up and running - 3 weeks of messing around to get a piece of SW to limp though. Norton Ghost was/is easy by comparison. Conclusion from that is that there is no physical (disk / memory) reason why ATI does not work.

Brian - to answer your question, the comment
System will not boot again unless I select "restore last known good configuration". refers to the option on windows startup if select F8 to go to safe mode.

My conclusion then is that there is an issue with ATI-11 whereby it does change something which renders the system unbootable sometimes if the user is cloning disks which requires re-boot. I would not recommend this SW to users who are not technical and/or not prepared to spend hours making it work. Maybe I'm unlucky, but I'm still waiting for Acronis support to come back to me after 2 weeks.

 

I'm glad you found something that works.

The Acronis "Tools menu/Create Bootable media" option works very well in the creation of a usb Acronis Bootable Recovery Thumbdrive. The thumbdrive must be inserted and recognized by Winodws before TrueImage can display the usb thumbdrive as an option for boot creation. The bootable thumbdrive can then be used as an easy substitute for the Recovery CD.

When cloning, many of us recommend that the clone be performed when booted from the Recovery media and the intended clone be inserted in place of the original boot drive.