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Cloning fails for no apparent reason

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Am running TrueImage 2015 on a Windows 7 (64-bit) PC. It's worked fine for a long time but now I have a problem: The cloning process starrs ("Cloning" is displayed) then after a few seconds the PC reboots with no errors given.

There is 75 GBytes free on each 1 TB hard drive.

Any ideas on a solution or what I should check please?

 

Thanks

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More information will be needed to help you.

Are you able to make normal backup images for the drive you are wanting to clone?

How is the target drive (the one you want to clone to) connected to your system, i.e. USB, SATA, internal / external?

The statement that there is 75GB free on each 1TB drive seems strange as if you are cloning then the contents of the target drive will be wiped out and overwritten with the content of the source drive, so free space shouldn't be an issue?

What build of ATI 2015 are you using?  #6613 is the latest build.

Have you tried doing the clone operation from the bootable Recovery media (Linux or WinPE)?

Has anything changed on your system in the period since you said 'it has worked fine for a long time'?  
Are you talking about cloning working fine or just normal backup tasks in this statement?

Thanks for the reply.

I haven't tried making a normal backup image

Both are SATA drives

I only mentioned the free space in case it was somehow relevant

I'm using the latest build of the program, updated yesterday

I haven't tried cloning from any recovery media (have never needed to in the past)

There have been no hardware changes on my system since the last clone (a few weeks ago). No doubt some small software changes (updates to Firefox, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, etc).

Cloning has always worked fine in the past.

One thing I forgot to mention - a couple of days ago my PC crashed. On rebooting it wouldn't properly load up windows. On re-seating the two RAM SIMMs it started working again. I ran Chkdsk and a few errors were found on the second partition of the main drive (it has two partitions) but these were fixed. Maybe relevant perhaps? Even though I've run chkdsk maybe there is still some corruption causing TI a problem? If so, how do I check for those which Chkdsk is missing?

Typhoon,

Disk errors can certainly cause clone operations to fail.  In addition to chkdsk you should run scandisk.

Another possibility is your recent upgrade to the latest version of ATI 2015.  When you performed the upgrade, did you remove the previous version of ATI 2015 and all if its components?  If not, I would recommend performing a clean install.  Here's a link that explains the process.  It includes a downloadable utility, which you should use.

https://kb.acronis.com/content/48668

Regards,

FtrPilot

One further thought in addition to the good advice given above, as you have a clone of your system from a few weeks ago on your second internal SATA drive, have you tried booting from that cloned copy of Windows since having the PC crash?

I would assume that given you have the 2 internal SATA drives, it would be a case of configuring the boot drive in BIOS (or equivalent boot settings if UEFI) to test that the second drive is still good - this would give you the option of doing a reverse clone (from second drive to first drive) if needed, though you would need to ensure that you have backed up any changed documents etc that would be lost in doing so.

Do you make regular backup images of your primary drive data or are you just relying solely on doing the clone to create a mirror copy of your primary drive?

FtrPilot wrote:

Typhoon,

Disk errors can certainly cause clone operations to fail.  In addition to chkdsk you should run scandisk.

Another possibility is your recent upgrade to the latest version of ATI 2015.  When you performed the upgrade, did you remove the previous version of ATI 2015 and all if its components?  If not, I would recommend performing a clean install.  Here's a link that explains the process.  It includes a downloadable utility, which you should use.

https://kb.acronis.com/content/48668

Regards,

FtrPilot

 

Thanks for the advice.

I forgot to say that I have also run Scandisk.

I hadn't updated ATI 2015 before I tried the clone process yesterday and as the clone failed I THEN updated to the latest ATI 2015 (not a clean install though) just to see if it would fix the problem. So the Clone problem was present before the update.

Steve Smith wrote:

One further thought in addition to the good advice given above, as you have a clone of your system from a few weeks ago on your second internal SATA drive, have you tried booting from that cloned copy of Windows since having the PC crash?

I would assume that given you have the 2 internal SATA drives, it would be a case of configuring the boot drive in BIOS (or equivalent boot settings if UEFI) to test that the second drive is still good - this would give you the option of doing a reverse clone (from second drive to first drive) if needed, though you would need to ensure that you have backed up any changed documents etc that would be lost in doing so.

Do you make regular backup images of your primary drive data or are you just relying solely on doing the clone to create a mirror copy of your primary drive?

 

I haven't tried booting from the cloned copy but after a clone I do a test to ensure that I can read random files so I know that, at the time, the data is likely intact. I've just tried reading a few random files on the old clone and they were fine.

I don't backup my data, I just rely on a clone every few weeks (the data on my PC doesn't change often enough to warrant a more regular backup).

BTW, isn't there any kind of a log file that I can check (or set an option to create) so that we can see why the clone is failing?

See https://forum.acronis.com/forum/100029 which suggests that the log should be in the normal C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs folder if done under Windows, or else you will need to use the Bootable Recovery Media to get access to them.

 

Thanks very much, here are the last few lines:

 

    <event id="48" level="1" module="1" code="503" time="1455754580" message="Analyzing partition '1-1'..." />
    <event id="49" level="1" module="1" code="503" time="1455754580" message="Analyzing partition 'C:'..." />
    <event id="50" level="1" module="95" code="0" time="1455754580" message="Activator::Proceed begin" />
    <event id="51" level="2" module="95" code="0" time="1455754580" message="Partition \local\hd_sign(xxxxxxxx)\part_sn(xxxxxxxxxxx)start(2048) of disk \local\hd_sign(xxxxxxxx) has been skipped, because it has not enough space." />
    <event id="52" level="1" module="95" code="0" time="1455754581" message="LoaderActivator::GetLiveOsFile begin" />
    <event id="53" level="1" module="95" code="0" time="1455754581" message="LoaderActivator::GetLiveOsFile end" />
    <event id="54" level="1" module="95" code="0" time="1455754590" message="Activator::Proceed success" />
    <event id="55" level="1" module="95" code="0" time="1455754590" message="Activator::Proceed end" />
    <event id="56" level="1" module="8" code="0" time="1455754591" message="ServerLRPC::_CloseConnection id=2,876" />
    <event id="57" level="1" module="8" code="0" time="1455754591" message="ServerLRPC::_CloseConnection id=4,252" />
    <event id="58" level="1" module="8" code="0" time="1455754591" message="ServerLRPC::_CloseConnection id=2,876" />
    <event id="59" level="1" module="8" code="0" time="1455754591" message="ServerLRPC::_CloseConnection id=5,892" />
    <event id="60" level="1" module="8" code="0" time="1455754591" message="ServerLRPC::_CloseConnection id=5,892" />

 

I've highlighted the pertinent part in bold. Note: I've put "xxxxxxxx" in place of some serial number (?) strings.

So there's not enough space? Ao I need to delete some files on the source disk before I clone the drive?

The error message 'not enough space' seems odd assuming that both drives are of the same size (1TB) which makes me wonder if it is referring to the target drive rather than the source?

I would suggest checking the partition serial number from the error message with that of the partitions on each of the drives - you can do this by using a tool like Speccy - http://www.piriform.com/speccy - look at the Storage details where the Volume serial numbers for each partition are shown.  The only issue here might be if those are duplicated on each physical drive by virtue of being cloned!

Another approach would be to delete all volumes on the second / target drive and then retry the clone to the 'empty' drive and see if you still get the same error?  You can remove the volumes from within Computer Management / Disk Management within Windows - right-click on This PC and select Manage.

Thanks, it's all very puzzling!

I guess I'll have to try and delete the volumes on the target drive.

It's annoying that the software was a lot more informative on what was causing it a problem.

Bit of a thread bump as this old problem has reared its head again. I did manage to resolve it last time but I'm not sure if I remember what I did, I THINK that I completely reformatted the destination drive.

I wish I knew what was causing the clone to fail, there's nothing useful in the Log files.

The lack of information given out by the program is very frustrating.

 

Typhoon, there are logs available in the offline rescue media provided you access them before you reboot from the operation you were performing.  Once you restart then they are lost.

Offline rescue media? Where/what is that?

What I'm doing is setting up the Clone in TrueImage under Windows 7 (64 bit), then it of course wants to reboot. As the clone process takes a few hours I set this off just before I go to bed and it's usually fine, I can see that the clone process IS starting (after the reboot) but when I go to look at the computer in the morning it has of course powered off (as it's supposed to). However, on booting up Win 7 I found that the clone process hasn't worked.

Typhoon, the offline rescue media is media that you create either on CD/DVD or USB stick and is the recommended method of performing a clone operation rather than doing this from within Windows, especially if you are cloning the Windows OS drive, as a reboot is always required.  Acronis modifies the Windows Boot Configuration data if the clone is started within Windows and this can cause boot problems if anything goes wrong and the boot configuration is not reset back to your normal values.

In the scenario that you describe, provided you do not elect to shutdown after the clone operation, then you should still see the option to review the log for the clone operation, as you are effectively using the same Acronis offline environment.

Without the log it is impossible to know what the cause of the clone failure was.

Thanks very much for the explanation.

I seem to have "fixed" the initial cloning problem - I ran a scandisk on both drives (no errors reported), cloned the drive again and this time it worked.

Very strange, but I'm glad it worked. :)