Clone Disk
Acronis True Image Home v10 on Windows XP SP3 on a Dell OPtiplex 745
1 x new 1TB SATA drive installed. Recognised by the bios. Used Disk Management to format it which made it a dynamic drive. Started a manual clone with proportional partitions. Both disks listed as IDE (0) Secondary Master. PC reboots (only twice with blue screen running Acronis Analysis), 3rd reboot is normal & disk is not cloned.
Something seems to be stopping it cloning fully.
Hi James, You'll have to forgive me as I'm a bit out of my depth. Things have changed since I last opened up a PC. I have started DiskPart & run list disc. This is the result.
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
------------ -------- ----- ------ ----- -----
Disk 0 Online 233 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 932 GB 193 KB *
Disk 2 Online 1397 GB 0 B
I'm confused.
My original source HDD is a partitioned 250MB
The new one I want to clone to is a 1TB HDD
I'm not sure how to clean the disk & certainly don't want to clean the wrong one.
When I used Windows Disk Management before I don't think I had any option except to make it a dynamic disk. I feel like I'm drowning here.
Very grateful for your help.
While in diskpart, enter the command "list disk" to see your disks (looks like you already know how to do that). To select a disk, type "select disk #" where # is the disk ID number from the "list disk" command . Then use the "Detail disk" command. This will show details about the currently selected disk. If this information is correct, you can then issue the "clean" command. If the "detail disk" command shows you information about a different disk then the one you want, run the "list disk" command again to check that you used the correct disk ID number, then use the "select disk #" command again to select the correct one. I ALWAYS issue the "detail disk" command before running any other command in disk part to be SURE I have the right disk. This will make the disk "raw". After "cleaning" the disk exit diskpart. Open Windows Disk Management. Windows will automatically recognize the disk has not been initialized and ask if you want to initialize it. If you get a selection to do either GPT or MBR, choose MBR (using Windows XP, you should not get a choice here). Once it is initialized, you should be able to clone to it using the bootable media. If you want to be able to see the disk and use it in Windows before "cloning", while in Windows Disk Management, you would need to right-click on the unallocated space on the hard drive in the list and choose the first option to create a partition. Then right click on the newly created partition and format it. Use the defult options, except change the disk label to something you want to use.
I managed the diskpart & Disk Management parts OK. Drive now appears as it should.
I made a new boot CD. My system ignores it when booting.
So...... I tried cloning from Acronis on my PC. All looks OK except there is only the first reboot, the screen showed a total of 3 required.
I get the blue screen & finally congratulations drive has been successfully cloned, press any key to shut down.
Pressing anything at all has no effect whatsoever and the disk is not cloned.
:-((
PS no mention of it being being an *AF* drive.
You should be able to change a setting in your BIOS to have the system look at the CD drive first when trying to boot. Change this setting, and then try the clone from the bootable disk. After the "clone" is finished, you would need to remove the old disk and connect the new disk in the same place the old disk was connected to test if the system boots properly.
Hey James, it all works perfectly now.
Thanks very much for both your guidance & patience.
=^..^=