Acronis True Image

[Seekermeister]

I need to clone an OS to another HD on my system, but I have never done anything like that before, except with Dantz Retrospect Express...but it didn't make the clone bootable. Does True Image...or would I have to do something more manually?

 

[John]

Your hard drive mfg offers a free cloning tool, but Acronis does more than clone and is arguably the best backup, image, and cloning tool available.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Yes, True Image is amazing, I love it. Have been using it for a while now even transferring bootable OS installs from a single drive to a bootable RAID0 array with much success, speed, and ease.

 

[Seekermeister]

I just tried the clone with a trial copy that I have of TI 9.0, but it failed. It said that there wasn't enough freespace...that I can understand, sort of, because I tried to move to a drive that is much smaller than the old drive. But, the only partition on the old drive only occupies about half of the space...apparently it want to copy the unallocated space also. It also spoke of partition errors and suggested running chkdsk, but I just did that last night and doubt that there is any problems. I tried automatic, As It Is and manual, but each came up with the same errors.

All that I want to copy is the active partition, but I'm afraid to try to copy it on my larger drive, because it is divided into multiple partitions of about 50GBs each, which is still smallere than the 80GB drive that I want to clone from. It sounded as though it would destroy data on the target drive, and that I'm not willing to do.

John,

I scanned the downloads on both the WDC and Maxtor websites, and all that I saw were diagnostics, which I didn't recall having any cloning capability. Would you be more specific?

 

[John]

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1

Description:
The downloadable Data Lifeguard Tools now comes in both DOS and Windows versions and was written specifically for the installation of Western Digital EIDE hard drives. If your computer system already has a hard drive installed with an operating system of Windows 98SE or greater, you should use the Windows version of Data Lifeguard for best results. The DOS version is required if installing a hard drive in a new system without existing operating system support. If you plan on copying the contents of a boot drive, Western Digital recommends using the DOS version of Data Lifeguard Tools.

 

[Seekermeister]

I just finished the cloning, and DLG reported that everything went okay, and made the new partition bootable. However, when I reset the boot order to that drive, it tried to boot to Suse, which I had installed on the drive previously, both in time and location. I thought that it wouldn't matter, because SuSe installed Grub without touching the MBR, but I was obviously wrong. I thought about running FIXMBR in the Recovery Console, but I wanted to ask someone that knows more about this sort of thing first. What is the best way to straighten out the mess?

 

[WildHorse]

Seekermeister,

I don't know about that Data Lifeguard thing.

Since you have a Maxtor hdd, what you want to do is get MaxBlast 4. It may be on a CD-ROM that came with your hdd, or if not you can download it from Maxtor's web site. It's free.

Use MaxBlast 4 to set up the new logical drive, then use MaxBlast 4 to simply clone from old to new drive. Easy. As long as at least one of either your source or your destination hdd's is Maxtor brand, MaxBlast works like a charm.

 

[Seekermeister]

Thanks, but DLG seemed to do the cloning part of the operation okay. I think that where I went wrong was that I didn't format the SuSe partition so that MCE would have been alone in the first partition, then reinstalled SuSe afterward. What confuses me is that neither MCE or SuSe are on the MBR, and I'm not sure of the best way to remedy that.

 

[Seekermeister]

Well, something went badly wrong. I marked the partition as active in Disk Management, edited the boot.ini to point to that partition, on boot it pops a long message, the gist of which is that there was some kind of hardware configuration problem. It's probably my fault, but I have no idea of what that fault is. I guess that I'm simply going to have to do a clean install, but I hate to, because I shall lose about 24 hours of work that I already did. However, if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.