OK, this should be easy (Acronis VERY slow to clone)

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rickg17 · #1 Post by **rickg17** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 1:38 am

OK, time for a better drive in the T42. The original 40G drive is fine, but has 5G left. And, anyway, it's 4200RPM...

So I get a new 7K100 100G drive from Newegg with an external enclosure.

I hook everything up and download Acronis True Image 9.0 build 3633. I choose to clone the disk, point it at my current C: drive as a source and the external 7K100 as the target. I kick it off... and 2 hours later it's 1% done...

OK, I had the drive hooked up via USB 2.0... maybe Firewire will be better... Nope, same story.

Any ideas? Nothing came back in a couple of quick search for acronis on the forums...

vital-analitix · #2 Post by **vital-analitix** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 4:06 am

1) Partition your 80Gb. Make the first partition of a size that will leave you enough space for a backup on the second partition.
Create with Acronis a backup partition in the free space on the 2nd HD.

2) Backup 40 Gb HD onto the second partition of the 80 Gb.

3) Swap HD

4) Restore from the second partition.

5) Delete second partition on 80 Gb through Acronis.

All done! (and more than likely faster too)

PS I am assuming that the HD is NOT a SATA drive, there have been reported problems with those (very slow with some backup / recovery stuff, eg PQDI does not like it)

Marinus

#3 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 6:17 am

I don't know if this will help, but you might try the following (at your own risk, as I have not tried it). Open Windows Task Manager by pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL. Click on the Processes tab, then right click on the process that is doing the cloning and raise the priority. I just noticed this feature recently in Windows Task Manager and haven't messed with it myself.

rickg17 · #4 Post by **rickg17** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 11:15 am

Marinus,

thanks. I'll try it that way. Odd that we should need to jump through hoops like that, but hey, it's tech...

gomjabbar,

Once Acronis has rebooted and started cloning it doesn't seem to want to respond to Ctrl+Alt+Del... too bad as that might help.

I'll try this in a little while and reply back with results.. thanks!

#5 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 12:18 pm

rickg17 wrote:Once Acronis has rebooted and started cloning it doesn't seem to want to respond to Ctrl+Alt+Del... too bad as that might help.

Well it was just an idea. I haven't used Acronis myself, so I guess I'll leave it to others unless I happen to run across something in my reading.

cmarti · #6 Post by **cmarti** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 12:29 pm

Strange, when i clone mine it only took around 25 minutes your enclosure is a usb one?

unimorpheus · #7 Post by **unimorpheus** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 12:45 pm

Maybe I am missing something but your TrueImage clone should drop into DOS mode after a reboot to clone the drive. If it is still in XP then something is amiss.

rickg17 · #8 Post by **rickg17** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 2:20 pm

Acronis does drop into DOS, but it's the same, odd XP like interface that you get when you chkdsk C: and Windows does so at the next reboot....

Yes the 7k100 is ATA-6/PATA....

cmarti... Tried this with both USB and Firewire...

Acronis doesn't impress me though. Tried Marinus's suggestion, but Acronis whined about not being able to read from sectors. And, on reboot after Acronis complaining, the logical drives would not appear and the E: drive was corrupted... Grrr.... I know Acronis has gotten good mentions here, but I simply don't trust it - if it's having issues, I expect some errors back in the UI. Aside from the sector read errors, I've gotten nothing, and I'm not sure about the accuracy of those....

Now, of course, the drive COULD be bad... or the enclosure could be flaky... but chdsk doesn't reveal issues. Next step is to try simply copying over a few gigs of data to see if I can xfer large amounts of data at all. If not, the drive's off to Newegg... (sigh...)

gomjabbar - nice thought, thanks. If you don't use Acronis, what do you do? Me, I'm thinking of breaking out the recovery disks (if I can find them all) and starting from scratch. Might be faster...

jsteele · #9 Post by **jsteele** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 2:40 pm

That's odd. I use Acronis to clone/copy my primary 80GB 7200RPB drive to a 80GB 5400RPM drive in the second bay adapter and it takes about 20-25 minutes. My wife uses Acronis on her Dell notebook to clone/backup a 60GB 5400 RPM drive to a 80GB 4500 RPM drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure and it takes about the same.

rickg17 · #10 Post by **rickg17** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 2:49 pm

Ok, this may not be an Acronis thing after all..

I decided to repartition the drive in Windows... did so, created 2 drives, formatted as NTFS.
Started a backup using the Windows backup tool... Estimated time to complete... 12 HOURS!

Now we're talking about 27G of data so an hour, even 2 wouldn't surprise me.. but 12...

I think the drive's going back. Before I do that, one question... Since the USB 2.0 ports on the Thinkpad refuse to act as 2.0 ports (don't ask... mobo....) I've been using PCMCIA cards for USB 2.0 and Firewire connectivity. My assumption is that this still gives me a reasonable fraction of the speed of these interfaces. Maybe not the full 4ooM, but something close. Is that, in fact, a safe assumption? Or does the PCMCIA interface drastically slow the xfer speeds?

rickg17 · #11 Post by **rickg17** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 8:57 pm

Well, OK then... I didn't want to send the drive back without trying to isolate the issue... Hmm... I know, I've been curious about Ubuntu on and I did just download the 6.06 (dapper Drake) CD image. And it's burned....

So I popped out the 40G, popped in the 100G, rebooted from the Ubuntu CD...

Works fine. I'd already rsynced all of my files to my home server, so after the install I grabbed them back down... And this post is being done in Firefox 1.5 from my fresh Ubuntu install...

I'm going to work with it for a day or two, but the good news is that everything seems to work fine including wireless and suspend....

vital-analitix · #12 Post by **vital-analitix** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 12:11 am

Another thought: How are you powering the drive in the USB port?

These ports are limited to 500mA current and some of the newer drives use a lot more than that.

In that case you may reverse: put the 40 Gb in the external and the 100 Gb in the laptop and then you could work it (if the 40Gb draws less than 500 mA current)

Marinus

rickg17 · #13 Post by **rickg17** » Mon Jun 05, 2006 2:09 pm

Marinus,

External 5V power supply...

I'm mystified as to why I've had so many issues. The thing is, there are a lot of variables - the drives (which both seem OK), the PCMCIA card (though this happens on Firewire and USB both) the external case itself....

On the other hand, Ubuntu is working fine... Now it install the new BT module I got last week.

BTW, thanks everyone for your suggestions and help.

vital-analitix · #14 Post by **vital-analitix** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 12:07 am

Rick

I can commiserate. Years ago when I initially startedd to play with external HD I got some PCMCIA card based external enclosure.

It worked fine until I put in an 11 Gb HD....had me stumped. At the end of the day something went awry when partitioning anything over 6 Gb in that particular enclosure.

I also remember the first time I got a HD > 32 GB and used some third party partitioning software. Everything went fine, created a FAT32 partition and then the crazy thing would halfway slow down with it's formatiing. Had me stumped until I discovered the 32 GB limit of FAT32....

I am just wondering if things would work fine if you put the 40 Gb in that enclosure and clone in opposite direction, who knows there may be some quirk with the enclosure / 100 Gb HD.

Good luck anyway

OK, this should be easy (Acronis VERY slow to clone)

OK, this should be easy (Acronis VERY slow to clone)

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