Acronis Clone

[Gene E. Bloch]

That's what I want. When I had XP I was using Copy/Wipe and it did a really
good job, but I've been told, haven't tested it yet, that Copy/Wipe will not
work with Vista or Windows 7. I'm going to test Copy/Wipe with Windows 7
doing a Sector by Sector copy and see how that works.

Too many toys!

That's because it's the Christmas season.

What I do these days (but not often enough) is use both Macrium and
Casper, on separate drives. So I have two backups, one a clone and one
an image. I like the redundancy.

BYW, both Macrium and Acronis allow you to see some old and new
versions of a file, depending on how you mount the image as a virtual
drive. I haven't found a way to view two versions simultaneously,
though. I mount starting with one of the several .tib or .mrimg files,
and the virtual drive I see is the one corresponding to the state of
the drive when that particular incremental BU was made.

The clones won't do this: they end up as a snapshot of exactly one
state of the source drive.

 

[Bill Blanton]

That's what I want. When I had XP I was using Copy/Wipe and it did a really good job, but I've been told, haven't tested it yet,
that Copy/Wipe will not work with Vista or Windows 7. I'm going to test Copy/Wipe with Windows 7 doing a Sector by Sector copy and
see how that works.

If you're talking about Terabyte's CopyWipe program it should work for a
raw sector copy (clone). The only time you would have a problem is if
the BIOS did not recognise the the full size of the drive, or if you booted
the source drive with the clone attached. In which case Windows7 would
assign a new disk signature to the drive, making the boot config data on
the clone invalid to boot itself.

 

[SC Tom]

See my reply to MJMIII's post (I say this only because I'm a little unsure
if you agree with him or with me).

What I should have added to that post is that with Acronis, you can create
a bootable rescue CD which does enable you to restore the image to a new
drive.

That's also true of Macrium that I use, but EASEUS and Casper that I
mentioned in this thread do create drives that you can just drop in, in
place of the old drive.

That's what I did with my notebook's Vista drive- using the Acronis boot
disk, I made an image of it to my USB drive, took the old (Vista) drive out,
put a brand new drive in, and wrote the image to it. Then I upgraded it to
Windows 7. I figured if anything went terribly wrong, I could put the cloned
Vista drive back in until I could find out what went wrong. Since the
upgrade went well, I just put the old drive on a shelf in case I need it,
but I do make regular images to my external drive. I have used images to
replace 2 crashed drives (1 Vista and 1 XP), and find it a great way of
getting back up and running. I think it's the easiest and fastest way to
restore- it took about 45 minutes to do the Vista drive and about an hour
for the XP one (lots more data) and I was up and running.
I like using the Acronis boot CD rather than doing it from within Windows-
it takes less time to create an image that way (on my systems, anyway).
I agree with you that you need Acronis (or whatever image program that was
used) to restore that image to a new drive before the drive is stand-alone.
But I think that's also what MJMIII was saying when he mentioned "have a cup
of coffee." (Maybe not.)
I've never used it mount an image, although I can see where that might be
very useful to restore certain files that were maybe infected and wiped.

 

[MJMIII]

Not so. The image is a compressed file (or set of files) in Acronis's
proprietary format.

You must use Acronis to restore an image to a drive, and you must use
Acronis to mount an image as a virtual drive.

I should've said "boot to the Acronis boot disk you created."

 

[retsiger]

If you choose acronis - why not use another utility made special for this, named
Migrate Easy. Not sure if it is exactly what you are looking for, but give it a look
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/

 

[Lee Rowell]

Then the problem appears to be in the wording on the Manual Mode setup.
There it mentions "Moved". I want to use Manual because I don't want all
the partitions moved. One partition I don't want moved is the Dell Restore
Partition.

It's useless now.

--
"To announce that there must be no criticism
of the President, or that we are to stand by
the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American public."
Theodore Roosevelt
http://www.bobhatch.com
http://www.tdsrvresort.com

The problem is in the wording. In translating into English someone has used
the word "moved" instead of the word "cloned". Nothing gets moved from the
source hard disk.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

I should've said "boot to the Acronis boot disk you created."

Yeah, sometimes in the heat of the moment one (anyone) leaves out a
word or phrase

We're on the same page and the OP is now fully informed (or not?).

 

[MJMIII]

Yeah, sometimes in the heat of the moment one (anyone) leaves out a word
or phrase

We're on the same page and the OP is now fully informed (or not?).

He might not be satisfied, but he's informed.

 

[Bob Hatch]

He might not be satisfied, but he's informed.

I got the information I needed, and thanks to all.

This would have gone better face to face.

--
"To announce that there must be no criticism
of the President, or that we are to stand by
the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American public."
Theodore Roosevelt
http://www.bobhatch.com
http://www.tdsrvresort.com

 

[MJMIII]

I got the information I needed, and thanks to all.

This would have gone better face to face.

Agreed and good luck.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Agreed and good luck.

Same from me...

 

[rharris270]

Minor Clarification

True Image can certainly "clone" one hard drive to another. I just did it this Spring on my PC. This option is normally used when increasing the size of the hard drive inside the computer. However, True Image can also clone to a smaller hard drive, if everything fits.

If you use automatic mode, each partition will be expanded proportionally, if possible. By "if possible", I mean that some parition types are limited in size. For example, FAT16 was limited to 2 Gig. But, FAT32 and NTFS can be almost any size. Anyway, True Image is smart enough to protect you from most bad choices.

In a traditional cloning operation, both hard drives must be connected to the PC at the same time. Data is copied form one hard drive to the other. The boot record is also copied. If you see an option to erase the old drive, DON'T do that, at least not yet. Be 100% sure that the PC boots and runs normally with the cloned drive, then think about erasing the old hard drive, or re-using it in an external USB enclosure.

One of the previous posts described an alternative to a traditional cloning. That is to make an image on an external disk, swap internal disks, then restore the image to the new disk. This option is only needed if you can not attach both drives internally at the same time. It will obviously take more time, and is not recommended, if you can do a direct cloning.

I highly recommend using the bootable CD, which True Image will make for you. It is safer to clone a disk when the operating system on the disk is not being used.

You should be pleasantly surprised how easy and fast the cloning operation really is.

One word of caution: If the new drive is larger than the old one, be sure that the PC can handle it. Over the years there have been many limitations on disk size, including BIOS, disk controllers, operating system, etc. Assuming that you are running Windows 7, it will have no problem with large disks, at least in the low tera-byte range.

 

[Char Jackson]

Actually, it is, as you later mentioned below.

OK, my bad...

I no longer have Acronis installed, so I couldn't look at the menus -
and I trusted my memory (shudder).

I only used it to make images.

I suspect that they meant copy, not move, but it might worry me too

Actually, the user manual mentioned earlier in this thread mentions a
couple of times that no data is changed on the source drive, that the
clone operation only READS from the source disk and WRITES to the
destination disk. (Emphasis added) I suspect the OP was just being a
little overly cautious. Section 20 of the manual is fairly clear about
cloning, IMHO.

Still: the two programs I mentioned will clone a single partition or a
whole drive. I think Acronis only does the whole drive, which is why I
misremembered that it does nothing: it does nothing that I wanted at
the time...

I use Acronis Disk Director to clone individual partitions, but you're
right, there are many tools that do about the same thing.