Seagate hybrid drive clone fails
I used the TI boot disc to clone my original hard drive in my Toshiba Satellite L555 to a Seagate 1Tb hybrid drive. Cloning worked great and the Seagate booted up fine in the laptop. All the partitions from the original drive was present (thought obviously the recovery partition won't work due to location and drive size differences). However, later when I wanted to clone this hybrid drive to an external drive again for backup, everything proceeds normally until the actual process begins; the progress bars show up and everything but after a few seconds, the error window pops up saying the cloning failed. I know cloning works because it did when I cloned the original standard drive to this hybrid drive, but now trying to clone this hybrid drive to another drive won't work. Is this a problem with hybrids? (I've cloned my other laptop drives to larger standard 1Tb drives and they can be cloned just fine. It's just cloning this hybrid drive that doesn't seem to work.) Thanks for any ideas or comments.
1. Why do you want to clone the drive to an external HD? You cannot boot from an external HD.
2. Cloning should be performed only from the ATI bootable Rescue Media. You didn't say if that's what you're doing.
The reason I'm cloning to a USB drive is because my laptop doesn't have TWO internal drives. What I'm doing is making a complete backup image (I do it every month or so on my desktops without problems) so if my primary boot drive should die or get corrupted, I wouldn't lose more than a month's worth of stuff; all I'd have to do is replace the bad drive with my cloned backup and it would boot to windows as the original did on the day it was cloned. In contrast, if I only backup my data files and such and I had a catastrophic failure, I'd have to replace the bad drive, reload my OS and all the updates from day one, reinstall all my apps (if I can remember every one of them I had installed), update all of my apps, reinstall all of my email clients and profiles, reinstall my browser and it's profiles and bookmarks, etc., etc., etc. You get the picture; I can take 10 minutes and replace the bad drive with my cloned one OR I can spend a day or two just getting the PC back close to what I had. Seems to be a no-brainer why I'd want to clone my drive.
BTW, I tried both ways; putting the destination drive in the laptop with the source on my usb interface or the way I originally did with the OEM drive in the laptop and the destination drive on the USB interface (which as I said before, worked fine going from my Fujitsu OEM drive to the Seagate Hybrid drive. It's just that I can't clone the Seagate drive either way, which leads me to believe it has something to do with the hybrid drive.
To achieve your goal, a full disk mode backup would be much better than a clone. You would be able to store multiple backups on a single external HD, whereas a clone would only allow one. Backup and restore is far superior to cloning, and much safer.
i know this is an old thread but i have the same problem. The above proposed solution does not work. Full disk backup and recovery results in an "unbootable media detected". This is a Hybrid drive issue and possibly specific to the seagate momentus series. The hybrid drive moves actual programs (not just cache) to a small NAND Flash section for fast load. Acronis appears to see this small NAND Flash as a new partition and tries to save it as a dual partition image. I know Acronis FAQ states that the bootable Acronis media does not support hybrid drives and there is no known solution. There is no mention of whether or not the loaded software version acronis would work and if so how? (note: i tried it and no it creates a dual partition unbootable disk)
Matthew, the type of hybrid drive that you have is the core issue here due to how this presents as two separate drives or partitions, so unless you are recovering to an identical drive there is no solution for this situation.
If you have either ATIH 2016 or 2017 you could try raising this as a Support Case directly with Acronis to see if they can offer any other suggestions on how to proceed, otherwise if you have the 2015 or an earlier version then you are out of luck unless you can find a third-party product that can handle this type of drive better than Acronis does?
Thanks for looking at the issue Steve and responding as an Acronis volunteer. I am reluctant to award Acronis's bad behavior for total lack of performance and support but the new hard drive is now working so here are the steps to clone a Seagate momentus Hybrid hard drive to a new hard drive using Acronis 2013.
1) create a Window recovery disk (go to run-> command -> "backup" and it will lead you to the option to create a bootable recovery disk)
2) perform a full disk backup as normal. Acronis will create an image that contains a c: partition, a MBR/partion0, and a un-named partition.
3) restore the c:partition and the MBR/partition0 to the new harddrive as disk restores.
4) restore the un-named partition as a file restore to a new location where the new location is the new c: drive.
5) install the new hard drive to the laptop and reboot(prior steps are done with the new harddrive on USB external cable)
6) you should get "major system error has occurred." black DOS screen. From here restart with the recovery disk and select "repair". Note: you may need the original Win7 Installation disk to do the "repair" which is what i used.
now the next reboot should start quasi-normal and win7 will boot up and start auto correcting the remaining errors.
I tried many other things but i think the above is the critical steps. Other things to try is #1) going to device manager->hard disks->ST95005620AS-> policies tab and unchecking the Enable write cache. #2) do a "as-is" recovery of the C: partition, MBR/Partition0, and un-named which results in you new hard drive with a dual partition image. Then go to file manager and move all files from the small partition to the larger c: partition (mainly you will see a folder called "Boot" and a system file called bootmgr but copy all). Then go to the hardware manager and delete the small partition, expand the large partition, and make the large partition as "active".
Matthew, thank you for documenting your solution to this question, and glad that you were able to get this working even if the process itself would not be regarded as being 'elegant' - the main point is that it worked for you by doing a Windows 7 Repair.
Fortunately, we see very few reports of these type of hybrid drives in the forums and most newer hybrid drives present as a single disk / partition which removes the need to jump through these hoops. (I have a 1TB Samsung hybrid SSD / spinning disk in the laptop I am using at present that cannot be distinguished from a normal 1TB drive other than looking up the specification for the drive).