help with clone disc
Hi i have a xphome sp3 pc and I have ATI 11 installed which I use regularly for backups. It had an 80g ide hard drive which i wanted to upgrade to a 250gb. Heres where the fun started. I hooked up the new drive on the same ide channel as the old one and jumpers in the cable select position. I chose to clone discs and use the full capacity of the new 250gb drive as drive c and then delete the contents of the old drve and keep it. Thankfully I backed up before i started. It chugged away for a while and then told me to reboot. Silly move, ERROR loading operating system. Stuffed around for ages, finally ran backup to new 250gb hd. No worries, except 250gb drive now only 80gb. Ok I repartition 250gb to full size. Computer working ok, except it wont boot with old 80g hard drive connected. Obviously xp is confused about which drive it wants to boot from. I take the hard drive out and try to format it on another xp machine. Seems the capacity of my 80 gb drive is now 65gb. properties tell me it has a mbr on it. It wont let me format it(no option)or create a logical or extended partition. How can i force it to format and get the full capacity back? Sorry about the long winded post but i wanted to be clear.
OH, sorry but i think i noticed when recovering the data to the new drive that the old one had something like acronis recovery wizard on it but it was not accessable??????
Hi, and thanks for the response, Ive used the clone procedure several times before without issue, but I do now recall advice about using it from the rescue disc instead of windows? If you want to read some waffle, the following explains the painful way I fixed my hassle. Fortunately immediately before I tried to clone i backed up the old hard drive. When the clone failed I restored the new 250gb hard drive with my image, which worked except the 250gb drive now had a capacity of 80gb, which is the size of the old drive. I resized the partition which fixed that problem. The only problem now was the pc would not boot with the old drive connected, so I took the drive out to another pc and tried to reformat it through a usb connection. Windows didnt want to know about it, as was the case with seagate tools, and it showed a capacity of only 65gb. I put the drive back in the original pc, disconnected the new one and ran the ATI rescue disc and wiped the contents of the drive. I then took both drives out, they were both connected to the same IDE channel with a 80 conductor cable and both drive jumpers were on cable select. I changed the new 250gb drive to master and the old drive to slave, connected the new drive to the end of the cable and the old on to the middle connector. Rebooted and success, it did actually boot. Windows successfully initialized the old drive, and a quick format bought the drive back to life with its full capacity. I know ive changed several things at once, meaning the actual cause of failure remains a mystery but as it works Im not going to play any further. The more I think about this the more I think its my stupid fault for running clone from windows. BTW yes its the old version 11. I have registered versiopns of 9, 10, 11, 2010 I use on several different machines and I believe ATI backup is the bees knees, but I must say in my case of only making full drive images macriums not bad either, im not so sure about acronis utilities though.
Thanks again
Your experience is one big reason why is it recommended that a full backup be performed prior to any cloning operation. There has been far too many postings of the sourece drive lost during these proceeding. The reason for the loss is varied anywhere from a user error to loss of power or simply a program or hardware malfunction.
If you restored using a disk option restore, if I remember correctly, that type restore is a "as is" restore and any extra space becomes unallocated. One cure is to restore each partition separately (but all in one pass) and then you have access to the resizing of partitions.
It is always best that your replacement disk is placed in exact same location (same connectors) as the original and jumpers may need to be realigned on the fresh drive.
The first booting with only the new drive attached is also very important as well as the use of the Rescue CD.
If there is another cloning, the guides will be there for your refresher.
Glad it worked out all for the good.
Thanks for the feedback.
Grover