Cloning process crashes twice in a row
I have ATI WD Edition and I wanted to clone my laptop HD to my external WD MyBook 250GB. My laptop HD is 200GB. It starts out well, but then, after cloning my recovery partition, the computer and the external HD are shut down and won't come back to life unless I disconnect my MyBook and perform a hard reboot on my laptop (press my on/off button for 5 sec).
Then my external HD will have a perfect clone of my laptop's recovery partition (about 9 GB), and that's all. After formatting the external HD (using command prompt in Vista: format i: /FS:FAT32), the computer is able to see only these 9GB out of 250! So I need to use Acronis drive cleanser to swipe out this partition (which takes about 8 hours!!), and then format the disk again to be able to use my full 250GB again. But then I'm back at the start: nothing has been cloned yet, and I spent a day rescuing my external HD....
I tried this process twice, but I'm not going to try it a third time.
Has anyone experienced or heard of a problem like this before? It would be really great to be able to clone my laptop HD before updating to Windows 7..
I thought cloning was making an image because the name "cloning" implies it copies every file on the disk to another disk as it is.
I have the HD formatted as NTFS now and I'll try to do the backup.
Thanks for your reply :)
The way True Image uses the terms Clone and Image, they are different.
If you clone a drive, the cloned drive is immediately bootable just like the original.
If you make an Image of a drive, the Image has to go through the Recovery (same as Restore) process, with another drive as its target before the target becomes bootable like the original.
The advantage of doing Images is that you can store more than one Image on the target drive - space permitting, whereas you can have only one Clone per drive.