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Cloning disks question

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I'm new to the forums so i apologize for the random forum i posted this is. This past weekend i successfully cloned my first disk. everything went great. The question that i have is i heard that you cannot clone say a 500gb hdd with 90gb of info on it to a lets just say a 120gb ssd. Is this true? The disk i cloned this weekend was a 160gb hdd with about 90gb of info on it, to a 220gb ssd. Ive read that the source disk capacity must be smaller then the destination disk capacity.

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No, a clone can be to a smaller disk so long as it is not smaller than the used sectors of the source disk.

You might not be able to clone to a disk that has the exact same amount in used sector size as the new drive (though it is not very likely that you would have lets say 64Gb of used sectors exactly and a new 64GB disk), there is probably a bit of safety room required so a 64GB used sector drive for example might require an 80GB drive to take account of sector realignments. I've never tried that though , so i could be wrong, but a slightly smaller drive is defintiely possible. You need to select the manual method of cloning..

On many websites, the general advice to cloning from large hard disk to smaller one, especially SSDs (lets assume only 1 main partiition C drive) is to first shrink the partition as small as possible on the larger hard disk so it smaller than the smaller hard disk

Effective shrinking can be done by turning off hibernation and hibernation temporarily, but this would probably only be needed if the target hard disk was very small say 64GB (:-) I remember when 20 MB was considered large!). Use of fraggle (freeware) or if you have to, Wndows defrag tool (fraggle is generaly more effective than Windows defrag)

I think I have a similar problem. I am using ATI V10. My HP Pavilian PC has a HDD of 500Gb (used portion = 64Gb) and I tried to do a disk clone to a 80Gb USB HDD I had lying around. Well guess what I had all sorts of problems. The 80 HDD is now shrunk in size to just 25Mb and showing only 896K free and it shows up as RED in My Computer window. I also noticed that I now have extra partitions showing as SYSTEM and FACTORY_IMAGE I already had these on the PC before this process but now they are two of each! WTF! Do I really need to just clone off to larger external disks - I actually did a really successful clone the day before on to a 1Tb HDD and had no problems at all. HELP. THANKS.

Johnlink,

When you say V10 do you mean TIH 10 or TIH 2010? There is a very big difference?

The problem may be due to HP having a non standard disk/sector layout and that is confusing True Image.

Did you perform an auto resize or a manual one?

Personally I think you would be better off making a complete image and restoring that to the new drive, but of course then you need another disk.

One way around the problem (assuming it is caused by a non standard layout by HP) is to have the old disk connected externaly and the new disk inside the PC and reverse clone, this will allow the PC BIOS to sort things out.

I am having a very strange issue. It has happened to me twice. First I tried to clone from a 1GB SATA HD to a SSD. The cloning failed and made the disk disappear from the system. I thought SSD went bad but manufacturer said it was good. Meanwhile while waiting for SDD to be returned I went and got a new 1GB SATA HD and tried the same thing. The cloning operation started out seeing the new drive but after the cloning failed the new drive is now invisible to my system. What is Acronis doing to these drives and how do I fix it?

Craig,

This sounds as though it is making the disk marker 'inactive' and not assigning a drive letter to it.

Try, using the Add Disk option first and then clone, alternatively if the PC is a brand name one and possiblky uses a non standard disk layout, try inserting the new drive into the PC and the old one into an external caddy - then reverse clone.