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Disk cloning failed. See log for details.

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Hey. I bought a couple of Crucial BX300 (120gb) SSD's to upgrade a couple of computers at home. One computer is a Windows XP desktop and the other is a Windows 10 laptop.

Cloning the Windows XP desktop hard drive was no problem. After changing the boot order the computer is now running much faster :)

But I'm having problems with the Windows 10 laptop. I get the following error when attempting to clone the hard drive:

"Disk cloning has failed. See log for details."

I found the tool which lets me view the log files. I made two attempts to clone and both log files say the same thing. Please see attachment.

The hard drive in the laptop is 1tb but has less than 100gb used space.

Can anyone tell me what's wrong?

Many thanks,

Sophie.

 

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Log.jpg 203.38 KB
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Sophie, welcome to these User Forums.

In this instance, it looks like your 120GB SSD is not large enough to allow the clone from your 1TB drive to it.  The format/resize error is occurring for your main C: Windows OS partition when ATI is wanting to reduce this from 919.9GB to 100.2GB size.

You other partitions on the 1TB drive are not being resized due to their type and use:

System 1GB
FAT32 100MB
C: 919.9GB > 100.2GB
No label 897MB
Recovery 9.489GB > 9.492GB
Total required space = 1GB + .1GB + 100.2GB + .897GB + 9.492GB = 111.689GB.

If you look at your 120GB drive, you will find that this is actually much less in real size, and all SSD's need between 10% - 20% free unallocated space for over-provisioning.

Steve Smith wrote:

Sophie, welcome to these User Forums.

In this instance, it looks like your 120GB SSD is not large enough to allow the clone from your 1TB drive to it.  The format/resize error is occurring for your main C: Windows OS partition when ATI is wanting to reduce this from 919.9GB to 100.2GB size.

You other partitions on the 1TB drive are not being resized due to their type and use:

System 1GB
FAT32 100MB
C: 919.9GB > 100.2GB
No label 897MB
Recovery 9.489GB > 9.492GB
Total required space = 1GB + .1GB + 100.2GB + .897GB + 9.492GB = 111.689GB.

If you look at your 120GB drive, you will find that this is actually much less in real size, and all SSD's need between 10% - 20% free unallocated space for over-provisioning.

 

Hi Steve and thank you for the reply. I don't know why it sees my C: drive as having 100.2GB used space. When I check the properties of C: it's only showing 71.4GB used space.

Also, since finding the forum I have noticed some warnings about cloning. Now I bought these SSD's thinking it was as simple as cloning and re-arranging the boot order. I watched a good few YouTube videos and didn't see anything like the points raised in this thread:

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2017-forum/important-cloning-how-not-do

Are you aware of any YouTube tutorials that sit more in line with the thread above? I don't know what the Acronis bootable Rescue Media is for example.

Many thanks,

Sophie.

Sophie, the forum topic [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this. was written in response to the high numbers of users who jumped straight into cloning without any understanding of the potential risks this can bring.

The Acronis Rescue Media is a means of performing Backup, Recovery and Cloning from a safe environment outside of your Windows OS and all the applications this can have active, such as security programs (antivirus, malware prevention etc).

The method of creating the Rescue Media is by using the Acronis Rescue Media Builder tool from within the ATI GUI options - this may differ slightly depending on the exact version of ATI you are using, and may differ if you have an OEM version of ATI (i.e. one supplied by Crucial for free with an SSD purchase) versus the paid commercial product bought from Acronis.

See KB 60820: Acronis True Image 2018: how to create bootable media as an example.

I don't know why it sees my C: drive as having 100.2GB used space. When I check the properties of C: it's only showing 71.4GB used space.

I would suspect that 100.2GB is the minimum size that your C: drive can be reduced to while still allowing sufficient free space for essential Windows files and folders used by the OS, such as the system pagefile, swap file, System Volume Information folders used for snapshot data etc.

If you go into Windows Disk Management and select your C: drive, then right-click and try the option to Shrink volume shown there.  This will give you an idea of how small Windows would let the partition be shrunk to.

2018-09-05 22_30_53 Shrink volume.png

Note: you may need to clean up your C: drive, remove temporary files and move any large user files such as music, videos, photos etc to another drive then retry the clone again.  I would strongly recommend making a full backup of the whole source drive before doing this.

Steve Smith wrote:

Sophie, the forum topic [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this. was written in response to the high numbers of users who jumped straight into cloning without any understanding of the potential risks this can bring.

The Acronis Rescue Media is a means of performing Backup, Recovery and Cloning from a safe environment outside of your Windows OS and all the applications this can have active, such as security programs (antivirus, malware prevention etc).

The method of creating the Rescue Media is by using the Acronis Rescue Media Builder tool from within the ATI GUI options - this may differ slightly depending on the exact version of ATI you are using, and may differ if you have an OEM version of ATI (i.e. one supplied by Crucial for free with an SSD purchase) versus the paid commercial product bought from Acronis.

See KB 60820: Acronis True Image 2018: how to create bootable media as an example.

I don't know why it sees my C: drive as having 100.2GB used space. When I check the properties of C: it's only showing 71.4GB used space.

I would suspect that 100.2GB is the minimum size that your C: drive can be reduced to while still allowing sufficient free space for essential Windows files and folders used by the OS, such as the system pagefile, swap file, System Volume Information folders used for snapshot data etc.

If you go into Windows Disk Management and select your C: drive, then right-click and try the option to Shrink volume shown there.  This will give you an idea of how small Windows would let the partition be shrunk to.

2018-09-05 22_30_53 Shrink volume.png

Note: you may need to clean up your C: drive, remove temporary files and move any large user files such as music, videos, photos etc to another drive then retry the clone again.  I would strongly recommend making a full backup of the whole source drive before doing this.

 

Thanks Steve, this gives me something to work with. I will look to locate the rescue media builder tool from within my Crucial version of Acronis.

Please see attached file for Shrink Volume quotation.

I did remove around 160gb of media files before attempting the clone.

Out of interest, is it possible to make a full backup of a whole source drive onto an external hard drive that already has files on it? or would I need a new dedicated external hard drive?

Many thanks,

Sophie.

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Out of interest, is it possible to make a full backup of a whole source drive onto an external hard drive that already has files on it? or would I need a new dedicated external hard drive?

Yes, this is the main purpose of making a Backup image (as opposed to using Cloning) - the backup image is similar to a zip file, so you just need enough free space on your backup drive to hold it.  See the link in my signature for 'Difference between Backup and Disk Clone' which has a lot more information on this subject.  You can restore a Backup image to a new drive to achieve the same results as using Cloning.

The Shrink Volume results always show less space freed than other tools.  Another method you can try is using a free partition manager program such as MiniTool Partition Wizard which will allow you to manually resize your partitions by dragging the side bars.  Note: the tool will require a restart when doing this for the OS partition due to locked files, but this again will show you just how small the partition can be made.

Hi,

For laptops, the source HDD shall be plugged via USB and the destination SSD shall be already in place. Then the cloning works.

Benoit, that is correct and as documented (see below).

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.