Skip to main content

Used 32-bit Acronis to clone disk on 64-bit system

Thread needs solution

Suffering here from lack of basic knowledge about PCs

My system is 64-bit.  The Acronis boot CD, made with Acronis 2017 installed in my 64-bit version of Windows 7,  wouldn't open 64-bit Acronis so I used the 32-bit Acronis to clone my old sata drive onto my new sata drive, assuming that only cloning speed would be impacted by using the 32-bit version instead of 64-bit.  The clone seems to be working fine but now I'm wondering if I've perhaps turned my 64-bit system into a 32-bit system, if that's even possible.

A check on "System informaion" reports it's a "x64-based pc" with a "windows/system32" system directory.  Am copying a large volume of files (57GB) from a USB drive onto the clone and it seems like it's taking a rather long time but without having speed tested a similar operation with the old drive, it's possible I'm imagining slowness where it is not.

Does using the 32-bit version of Acronis to clone a drive result in a 32-bit clone?  Should I be recloning?

 

 

 

0 Users found this helpful

No - you're fine. The operating system on the Acronis boot CD was a 32-bit operating system, but it was able to clone your disk, which contained a 64-bit operating system to a new disk. The result is a new disk with a 64-bit operating system installed.

Judy, welcome to these user forums.

A clone is an identical copy of the source disk drive to the target disk drive - all it does is to copy the sectors from the source drive to the target drive and recreate the partition structures that exist on the source drive for the target drive.

There is no way that doing a clone of a 64-bit system would result in creating a cloned 32-bit system on the target drive.

All Windows systems have a Windows/System32 folder regardless of whether they are 64-bit or 32-bit systems.

The time taken for performing a clone operation will depend on a number of factors, including the amount of data involved, the speed of the USB port and devices involved, the speed of the system performing the clone, amount of memory, CPU etc, along with whether any bad sectors exist on either of the drives involved.

Thanks for the stress-relieving info. 

My gut was saying what you folks tell me but I didn't trust it - with good reason.  My first attempt at the cloning project, starting with Acronis opened in Windows, brought a black screen and no progress bar.  My gut told me to be patient so I listened to my fans for 15 hours before finally rebooting the PC and discovering no changes had been made to the new drive.  Then I did what I should have done from the get and followed Acronis recommendation to start the process with a boot CD.  Cloning time was only 15-20 minutes for 107 GB of data between two 7200 drives.

Off to take a nap that doesn't include nightmares about corrupted disks.

 

 

Judy, glad to hear that the clone completed OK and you were best advised to have done the clone from the Acronis Rescue Media on CD, as starting a clone from within Windows can result in an unbootable system if anything goes wrong as the Windows bootloader configuration has to be modified to create a temporary Linux OS based environment from which to launch the clone operation.