Also having trouble cloning disc

[QNPoohBear]

I downloaded Acronis TrueImage free trial
I put my new hard drive in a hard disc enclosure
I followed the cloning wizard and it seemed to clone my service partition but not my primary partition! I didn't think it would clone the service partition.
I was advised by the Acronis Forum to swap the hard drives and put the new one in my T61 and my old one in the enclosure. I booted with the Acronis Bootable Media disc and it no longer seems to clone hard drives.
Now I'm at a stand still and don't know what to do. Any other suggestions for free trial programs? I bought the hard drive because it was on sale and bought the enclosure cheap on ebay thinking I could use the free trial of Acronis. I I'm really frustrated right now and could use an easy solution if anyone has one!

[diaz1023]

This is one thing that seems to be going around with Acronis, I was able to use Seagate Discwizard, but the new drive was a Seagate drive. The way it worked for me was to keep the original drive in the TP and the new one in the enclosure, I did have to keep the service partition the same size as on the original drive. Hope this helps

[syrahnose]

R drive seems to have a fully functioning trial version to download.

http://www.drive-image.com/?GGLAW303

Interesting that the trial version of Acronis says:

"The Trial version of Acronis True Image Home is fully operational but works only for 15 days."

[RealBlackStuff]

R-Drive Image can do (amongst other things):
Disk to Disk copy. An entire disk can be directly copied on another one.

Same limitation applies as in Acronis: demo only works for 15 days!

[syrahnose]

Given the reply below, the Acronis free download will not work to clone a hard drive from what has been written elsewhere on the forum. Does the same limitation apply to R-Drive. How about Ghost, no one seems to be using this lately?


R-Drive Image can do (amongst other things):
Disk to Disk copy. An entire disk can be directly copied on another one.

Same limitation applies as in Acronis: demo only works for 15 days!

[Nameless]

Given the reply below, the Acronis free download will not work to clone a hard drive from what has been written elsewhere on the forum. Does the same limitation apply to R-Drive. How about Ghost, no one seems to be using this lately?


R-Drive Image can do (amongst other things):
Disk to Disk copy. An entire disk can be directly copied on another one.

Same limitation applies as in Acronis: demo only works for 15 days!

Ghost 2003 works wonderfully for me. I recently was able to put together a bootable CD with the Panasonic USB drivers. That plus updated ethernet card drivers from the mfg website, and I can do all my imaging tasks on any of my machines including our TP's. I can image to USB connected hard drive, peer to peer TCP/IP, etc.

It does involve some hacking but google is your friend, and if you know DOS you can make this program do whatever you want. I just plain do NOT trust Windows-based imaging software. Ghost 2k3 has always worked reliably for me and I'll stick with it.

When it comes to imaging and backup software I strongly believe in 2 things:
1. KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid)
2. If one finds something that works, stick with it.

[syrahnose]

thanks, its ironic that I have Ghost 2003, but have never used it. I'll give it a go and see.

[visch1]

Several years ago I did the unthinkable! I PURCHASED TI for cash, and do what's highly recomended, MAKE BACKUPS on a regular basis. Real rocket science.

[Nameless]

thanks, its ironic that I have Ghost 2003, but have never used it. I'll give it a go and see.

Read this site. That guy talks about everything you'd want to know about using ghost 2k3. Highlights:

- bootable cd's - you need this if you want to image to a usb hard disk (eg. laptop scneario) and the only floppy available to you is a usb floppy (eg. laptop scneario) - this is because the usb driver does a reset of the usb bus as part of the detection routine and as a result it will lose connection with your usb floppy boot device! Ask me how I know this......... Boot cd is the only thing I've found that works consistently with a no-floppy thinkpad.
- getting & using the panasonic usb drivers - better device compatibility than the bundled iomega usb drivers - you can actually use a usb-connected hard disk formatted to NTFS. I'm told that the iomega drivers only allow FAT32 formatted usb hard disks.

Also read this wikipedia page for info on how to use liveupdate to pull ghost 2k3 updates from symantec's archive server.

Hope that helps!

[Nameless]

Several years ago I did the unthinkable! I PURCHASED TI for cash, and do what's highly recomended, MAKE BACKUPS on a regular basis. Real rocket science.

I don't know if this was directed at me but.... I also did the unthinkable and purchased ghost 2003 for cash! oem version, got it for about $7 in 2006.

Anyway I agree with the second statement, imaging s/w is useless if it's not actually USED!

[Marin85]

Maybe a long shot, but how about Acronis Disk Director? I know it´s rather "system" software offering many options to manipulate a HD, but one of these is to copy partitions Overall an extremely useful product!

Marin

[visch1]

"I don't know if this was directed at me but.... I also did the unthinkable and purchased ghost 2003 for cash! oem version, got it for about $7 in 2006.

Anyway I agree with the second statement, imaging s/w is useless if it's not actually USED!"


DEFINATLY NOT DIRECTED AT YOU! I just get tired of reading all the posts about failure of trial APPs not working to expectations. As if they will never back up after the clone or whatever. I image each drive I have weekly and it's saved my as..
I'm right now having fits with 2 brand new 1T drives. One actually shut off my monitor!

[Nameless]

DEFINATLY NOT DIRECTED AT YOU! I just get tired of reading all the posts about failure of trial APPs not working to expectations.

Ah, ok cool. Yeah I hear you on that one. No offense taken.....

[fredstev]

If some one ever offers a course "Disc cloning for dummies", I'll be first in line to take it. For as often as it is done, and the cheap availability of large capacity hard drives now, it is a pretty common upgrade. I've done it 4 or 5 times with Thinkpads and also on desktops, usually with minimal grief. I also own a licensed copy of Trueimage home Ver. 10 and Disk Director Ver. 11.

Here, for the entertainment of the truly skilled and knowledgeable on this forum is the results of my last two HD swaps:

1. My Son's T60 (XP Pro) had a Hitachi hts541040g9sa00 drive that was full. I ordered him a new Hitachi 7K320 0A57543 160GB HD. When it arrived, I popped the new drive into a ultrabay slim drive adapter, installed TI, selected "clone disc" and "manual" to adjust the new partition size and turned TI loose. When it was done, I swapped drives, and started the lappy up. Everything was fine, R&R partition transferred, no boot problems, etc. Found my Staples big orange "That was easy" button and hit it. Done. 45 minutes at the most. Went out to work on the tractor.

2. Waterloo arrives: A friend brings over her R61 (Vista Home Premium) with a full Hitachi 100 Gb hard drive. I order her a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ST9320421AS 320GB drive. When it arrives, I go into bios, switch to "compatibility" mode for the HD, install TI and attempt to repeat the sequence in (1.) above. TI gets almost done, and simply goes blackscreen. Oh-oh. Laptop is in hibernation, not "off". Owner had power setting for "sleep" on the power button. TI showed 291.7 Gb of unallocated space on the new HD. Fail.

Next try. Power setting corrected to "shut down", and try again. TI can't find the HD. Seems that bios switched the SATA drive back to AHCI mode. Reset. Try again. "unallocated space" instead of a formatted partition on the new HD. Fail.

I use Disc Director to partition and format the new HD. Write a few test files to new HD, all is well. Attempt to run TI again, when it reboots to start the process, IBM R&R comes up instead and wants to know if I want to attempt a disc recovery. I say no, then go for some alcohol. Fail.

Next morning: I get tired of attempting the "clone" operation and make a disc image, copy by sector to an external USB drive using TI. Remove old HD from Thinkpad, put new HD in, and use TI restore from the CD to restore the image from the USB enclosure to the new HD. New HD boots to IBM R&R. I spend an hour learning about hiding/unhiding logical drives. This finally works, however, and after doing some logical drive extending and unallocated space removal, all is well. I DID get lucky when I switched SATA in bios back to AHCI mode and rebooted. Vista found the correct AHCI drivers and reinstalled them. All is well. I did not bother looking for the Staples button this time. Succeed.

Advise for people upgrading their hard drives. Google and this forum are your friends.

[Marin85]

I also own a licensed copy of Trueimage home Ver. 10 and Disk Director Ver. 11.

I believe you rather mean TrueImage v11 and Disk Director v10

Thanks for sharing your experience! As of yet, for some mysterious reasons cloning doesn´t seem to be always a straight-forward operation as it is actually supposed to be...

[fredstev]

I believe you rather mean TrueImage v11 and Disk Director v10

Thanks for sharing your experience! As of yet, for some mysterious reasons cloning doesn´t seem to be always a straight-forward operation as it is actually supposed to be...

Yep, you're right - Trueimage V11 indeed. Isn't the first thing I've got bass-ackwards. TI is wonderful backup software, though and that is it's primary purpose. I've gotten pretty good at using it to archive drawings & tech-related Emails separately from our normal backups. Works slick.

[QNPoohBear]

I finally got a chance to clone my drive with the full version of True Image and it was so easy! Thanks for all your help everyone.