Cloning with Acronis 9.0

ati2012 will probably work pretty much the same in the particular regard. If the disk can't be read, you're bound to have trouble. If a spot is only weak, mutliple rereads, which programs normally attempt, might finally get you some data. But it could be that your disk is too bad to be usable. Often when hdisks fail, sector start going bad with increasing frequency and t some point, there's no way to keep up with the race to failure. This is why it's important to have backups on hand.

Your best best is to make a backup, not to clone, telling ati to do a sector by sector backup. If it is at all possible to read from the soruce disk, you will then get a copy inthe backup file, although all the bad sectors will be there also.

With cloning you get only one copy of the disk image, with backup you can have as many will fit on your target disk.

Ok. Thanks for replying.

I have already tried to make a full backup of the entire partition. In this case bad sector is reported, too, but the process does not hang and completes successfully. But for some reasons I am not able to bring the backup back to a new harddisk.
I have a Dell Dimension 8400. The harddisk has three partitions. There is a diagnostics partition to which can be booted with a Dell boot menu. I don't need those. I only need the system partition. But when I bring back the partition backup to a new hd, the system won'yt recognize the harddrives. I already tried this: made a bootable hd with fresh XP installed and then restored the partition to that one. Same result. Drives are not recognized.

I wanted to try the True Image 12.0, but I do not seem to get a trial serial number back from Acronis. I tried to order one yesterday with no luck, and I tried just 10 minutes ago, without success.

Last resort would be to try a filewise full backup and trstore it to a working XP harddisk...

For system partitoin, you usually need two partitons with Vista or w7. One of the partitions might be the windows reserved partition, whichc contains the boot manager -- you can't boot without it. It's usually about 100MB although on e.g., Toshibas which inlcude there errecovery stuff in that partiton, it's something like 1.6GB or so. It's possible for w7 to be installed using only one partition but that's not the norm.

Also, if you restore, before booting, check the bios to see that it shows the hdrive and check the boot order in the bios.

As I said I'm using XP. Then, I'm not sure one of these partitions is a boot manager. I can use the XP installation disk and create a fresh installation on a new harddisk no problem, though I have to insert the disk with harddisk drivers during start of setup. But after that I have a hd with XP which boots without problem. Also boot sequence and drives are setup properly in the bios.

Is there any reason why they shouldn't send me a trial version number for the ati 2012? I have registrated and downloaded the testversion and have sent the request and everything, but there is no answer...

I apologize. I wasn't paying enough attention. With XP the boot manager is the file called NTLDR, not a separate partition.

However, you might try restoring entire disk if the disk boots. Jsut to rule out any partiton boot issue.

WoF,
Acronis is pretty good about sending the serials. Have you checked your spam folder just to be sure?

@Grover: I'm using thunderbird and have no spam folder per se, although it indicates potential spam so as I can delete it before opening.
I shall try again, then.

@Scott: I tried already to save the partition as entire partition backup on an intermediate disk and restore it to the brand new hd I want it to be on.
First ry was to leave the disk formatted, second one I put a fresh XP on it, so as I was sure I could boot from the disk. When I was, I tried the partition restore, also without any success.
There is a message saying windows couldn't be startet, because it couldn't recognize the harddisks, which is weird, because this message MUST come already from the hd. I have a german OS and the message is in German.

Usually, this would only happen if you tried to restore the os onto diff hardware. Then it wouldn't have the right drivers installed and wouldn't recognize some of the hardware.

But that is not the case. I clone from drive 0 to drive 1. While cloning the disks are recognized perfectly.
It is true that when installing XP I have to press F6 to insert an own driver disk as explained in the Dell manual. But when having installed XP it boots perfectly. The partition I have backed up didi boot perfectly, too. Then I restore the backed-up partition to the new installation and no more booting is the result.
I told you I never had problems before with TI 9.0 with cloning and restoring until I had this larger amount of bad sectors, where cloning hung the program.

Btw.: I waited now several hours and Acronis did not send a trial key for my 2012 version. What did I do wrong?
I think I went through the process now for the third time properly, gave my email address, downloaded the file, started the installer, clicked on "Get trial serial number" and waited patiently for an email to arrive. Nothing happens.

Could it be tha the bad sector is in the boot or system area? When you clone/copy it, you have bad data in that sector of the clone.

Yes, but if I had a bad sector in the boot section of the original disk, it wouldn't boot, would it?
As it seems, the bad sectors have piled up in a large file ( a dump file) which was created a couple of weeks ago during a memory crash.
A memory module became bad for some reason and caused several system crashes, before I could track down the reason. During this the dump file was created and I could track down most of the bad sectors to be in this file.

Btw.: I'm now waiting another 24 hours for the trial key.
What am I doing wrong?
Whom can I ask why it is not sent?

If it was in the bootstrap itself, then you probalby couldn't boot. But could be a bad sector elsewhere in the system files.

WoF wrote:

Yes, but if I had a bad sector in the boot section of the original disk, it wouldn't boot, would it?

Ok, but windows comes up properly, or so it seems.

Tonight I might start a complete file backup to try again restoring all files to a fresh installed hd wit a bootable OS.

But I really would like to know why I don't get response for trial of version 2012...

Ok... maybe to be sure I try with my other email address...

Ok. Now I tried the filewise backup and when I wanted to restore it, it said this was not the first file of the backup set.
I had made a regular full file backup and spared out the file which has the bad sectors. So backup completed with no error message, but failed to restore as I'd just said.

Well, they finally sent a trial number for ATI 2012 when I used my other email address.
Unfortunately, I was very disappointed to find that the cloning function, which I'd needed most desperately, is disabled in the trial version.
Now I have run a full file backup with ATI 2012 which seemed to complete properly, and will try a full restore to a bootable hd tonight.
If this does not work I'm at my wit's end
Thanks for all your input.

You're better off doing a backup and restore.. Make a diskmode backup of the the entire disk. remove the source disk and replace with the target, boot with the bootcd and restore to the new disk. If it's the same size, just restore all partitions and track0 and disk sig.

If diff size, then uncheck the box for track 0 and then you can set the size for the non-reserved partitions and then afterwards restore track 0 as last step.

I have tried that under ATI 9.0. Cloned the entire disk. All partitions. It always worked before I had this bad sector issue.
I only need the system partition actually. So I tried to do a partition backup and restored the partition to a fresh disk.
The disk wouldn't boot then.

Sorry, maybe I don't undertand what you are saying.

I was suggesting diskmode to be sure you got all of the partitions needed to boot windows, i.e., the "C:\" partition and the reserved partition (Vista and W7). And then I gave hint at how to restore if restoring to a diff size disk than the original.

Ok. So I would make backups of all three partitions and restore them to the same positions on a new harddisk.
How can I make sure the boot sector is then copied, too? Because I have the impression it might be a special boot routine from Dell there.

On the other hand: I tried a filewise backup from the Dell's system partition, created a new hd with a fresh XP which actually booted, and then restored all the files to this disk. After completing the disk wouldn't boot anymore.

After you restore the partitions, then restore Track0/MBR. The only reason for leaving it off at first is so you can manipulate the partitions as necessary to adjust for a diff size hdisk. There's a section in the userguide that covers this reasonably well. Better than I can do here in this short space.

Ok then I shall RTFM and see what I can learn there about restoring Track0. I hope this function is included in the trial version.

Follow item 1 inside this link for a detailed method on restoring a full disk backup to a new disk.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618

Yes, well, thank you. I think I found out about track0 when i tried to restore the first partition of the Dell hd, which is their utility partition. It has also some empty space before. But then when I tried to restore the system partition, I found the diskbackup invalid. It says "This is not the last file of the backup". I think the same happened as to the cloner: it did not complete the backup but hung when this larger area of bad sectors was encountered.

Well, I think I give up now and reinstall the system to a new hd, without those fancy utility partitions. Thank you for all your help, input and guidance.

One more thing: Do you think it is possible to install Win7 together with XP on the same hd? Maybe in a second partition?
And if so, will the clone function of Acronis 9.0 work with this?