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I used Acronis True Image 8.0 and managed a succesful cloning of my stock 100GB7200rpm Hitachi Travelstar drive to a new 320GB7200rpm Hitachi Travelstar. I only got 11 error messages during the process stating that 11 sectors could not be copied.

Still when done, everything seemed to be on the new drive and I was able to boot 'er up with the new drive in and re-activated all the BIOS/Client ID passwords.

But the Windows XP Pro start screen now takes about 3 minutes longer to go away (before it would appear for about 30-60 seconds), and the Client ID log in, after log in, takes about 1-2 minutes longer to clear and start windows.

I ran diskeeper which analyzed and reported the new drive was in need of defragging. I did so but the start up time is still slow.

-Would this be a issue with the cloning?

-Or, based on size, does a 320GB HD take longer to load up than a 100GB HD (It pretty much takes 3 times longer to load from what I'm seeing)?
Thanks.

Delmarco wrote:I used Acronis True Image 8.0 and managed a succesful cloning of my stock 100GB7200rpm Hitachi Travelstar drive to a new 320GB7200rpm Hitachi Travelstar. I only got 11 error messages during the process stating that 11 sectors could not be copied.

Still when done, everything seemed to be on the new drive and I was able to boot 'er up with the new drive in and re-activated all the BIOS/Client ID passwords.

But the Windows XP Pro start screen now takes about 3 minutes longer to go away (before it would appear for about 30-60 seconds), and the Client ID log in, after log in, takes about 1-2 minutes longer to clear and start windows.

I ran diskeeper which analyzed and reported the new drive was in need of defragging. I did so but the start up time is still slow.

-Would this be a issue with the cloning?

-Or, based on size, does a 320GB HD take longer to load up than a 100GB HD (It pretty much takes 3 times longer to load from what I'm seeing)?
Thanks.

No, boot time should be the same. Error messages are NOT normal. Instead of a "clone" you may want to "image" the drive, if ver 8 allows this.

(the image procedure creates a .tib file, which is the Acronis extension for an image)

You would then run Acronis and do a "restore" to the new drive.

This will give you an exact copy of what is on your source drive and will not copy over anything else.

I ran the "Disk Clone" option. There is also an option to "Create Image" which I don't know much about.

Where does it save the .tib file to? Do I need both HDs connected at the same time? For it to image. I don't have a ultrabay HD caddy, just a usb connection for the new drive.

Delmarco wrote:I ran the "Disk Clone" option. There is also an option to "Create Image" which I don't know much about.

Where does it save the .tib file to? Do I need both HDs connected at the same time? For it to image. I don't have a ultrabay HD caddy, just a usb connection for the new drive.

"Create Image" is the choice that I have used with near 100% success for about ten years on dozens of machines.

The .tib file that is created can be put on any drive or parition except the one that is getting imaged, of course.

USB external drives are a very good place to save that image because Acronis will "see" the USB drive when the .tib file is laid down on the new drive.

Naturally, you must have an Acronis boot CD available in order to perform the new imaging task. That is easily created from the program that you probably already have installed on your old drive.

mgo wrote:
"Create Image" is the choice that I have used with near 100% success for about ten years on dozens of machines.

The .tib file that is created can be put on any drive or parition except the one that is getting imaged, of course.

USB external drives are a very good place to save that image because Acronis will "see" the USB drive when the .tib file is laid down on the new drive.

Naturally, you must have an Acronis boot CD available in order to perform the new imaging task. That is easily created from the program that you probably already have installed on your old drive.

I will try the "Create Image" option; Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I will do;

1. Remove new 320GB Drive and put in the old 100GB drive and reboot computer
2. Attach new 320GB drive via usb
3. Format-delete the 320GB drive
4. Run Acronis and choose to "Create Image" of the current 100GB placing the .tib file onto the 320GB drive?
5. Then once that is done should I swap in the new 320GB and boot up from the CD that I created with in the Acronis software?

Delmarco wrote:I will try the "Create Image" option; Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I will do;

1. Remove new 320GB Drive and put in the old 100GB drive and reboot computer
2. Attach new 320GB drive via usb
3. Format-delete the 320GB drive
4. Run Acronis and choose to "Create Image" of the current 100GB placing the .tib file onto the 320GB drive?
5. Then once that is done should I swap in the new 320GB and boot up from the CD that I created with in the Acronis software?

If you don't have an external drive to create image backups on, then cloning is the solution for you.

Normally, an image backup would be created onto an external drive while running on the 100GB drive. Then you would "restore" the image backup onto the 320GB drive using the bootable Acronis "recovery" cd (you would have replaced the 100GB drive with the 320GB formatted drive first).

The main problem with image restores is that all marked-as-bad sectors from the original drive are also marked-as-bad on the restored-from-image-backup drive .... not cool when you're installing a new drive. The cloning solution does not have this problem.

Therefore, before using cloning or image backups to move to a new drive, I always do hard drive error-checking to make sure that the original drive is as clean as possible.

If I were in your position, I would error-check the 100GB drive with both options checked, re-boot, and then attempt the cloning operation again and hope for NO errors.

Just tried the Image thing.
And when I went to create the tib file, it kept giving "Sector 0, Fail Read Hard Disk Drive 2" errors and didn't even attempt to write the image tib file to the connected USB back up drive. I also tried a 4GB SD card as a target for the .tib file but I got no success.

Now I'm just going to return and do the clone drive thing all over again which should take about 12 hours.

I'm assuming the original 100GB HD has the errors?

There it is again; more sector 0 errors

img]http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q250 ... 3-2026.jpg[/img]

img]http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q250 ... 3-2027.jpg[/img]

Delmarco wrote:I'm assuming the original 100GB HD has the errors?

If you do a Start --> All Programs --> Accessories --> Command Prompt --> chkdsk c:

.... then it will run the chkdsk in "read only" mode and will tell you if there are bad sectors or other NTFS file structure errors.

If there are errors, then you will need to cause an "error-checking" process to run upon re-boot which will attempt to fix all of the file structure errors on the disk and recover any data off of "bad sectors".

Delmarco wrote:Just tried the Image thing.
And when I went to create the tib file, it kept giving "Sector 0, Fail Read Hard Disk Drive 2" errors and didn't even attempt to write the image tib file to the connected USB back up drive. I also tried a 4GB SD card as a target for the .tib file but I got no success.

Now I'm just going to return and do the clone drive thing all over again which should take about 12 hours.

I'm assuming the original 100GB HD has the errors?

There it is again; more sector 0 errors

img]http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q250 ... 3-2026.jpg[/img]

img]http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q250 ... 3-2027.jpg[/img]

Have you tried running CHKDSK on both drives...especially the original 100 gig you are trying to image?

darn. Forgot about that....
Now I gotta wait until the cloning process is done. Which should be sometime tommorrow morning.

The "write errors to disk 2" bother me.

Since the 320GB drive should have nothing on it when the cloning process starts, then I would re-format it to make sure that it has no problems.

Run the HDD diagnostics in the BIOS.

I finally got it.

1. I ran the disk check error on the original 100GB drive making sure all errors were fixed. I also defragmented the 100GB drive.
2. Then I did a full format of the new 320GB (whereas before I was doing quick formats)
3. Finally I ran Acronis Disc Clone.

It was not only quicker this time about 1 hour instead of 10 hours, but the were NO error messages at all.

Now I got the 320GB drive installed and my T60 boots up quick and clean like the day I bought her home and took her out the box.

Thanks everyone. I really appreciate your help.

Delmarco wrote:I finally got it.

1. I ran the disk check error on the original 100GB drive making sure all errors were fixed. I also defragmented the 100GB drive.
2. Then I did a full format of the new 320GB (whereas before I was doing quick formats)
3. Finally I ran Acronis Disc Clone.

It was not only quicker this time about 1 hour instead of 10 hours, but the were NO error messages at all.

Now I got the 320GB drive installed and my T60 boots up quick and clean like the day I bought her home and took her out the box.

Thanks everyone. I really appreciate your help.

Nice going! You stuck it out and solved your problem. Obviously, Acronis saw the disk problems and refused to allow a bad image job, which is a testiment to their good programming, I suppose.

I love these success stories!

Nice work getting it fixed.

I like the cloning method of backing up with Acronis. When the disks are in good shape it usually works like a charm and is pretty quick as you discovered.

Since I use cloned backups if I ever need to restore and have no intention of ever reinstalling to factory defaults again, I finally decided to just delete my service partition and replace it with the Acronis Secure Zone (doesn't take up much space) which basically puts the bootable recovery CD on to a bootable partition on your hard drive. Then you can just boot into the Acronis Secure Zone any time you want to do another clone and don't even need to use the recovery CD.