Force Sector by Sector clone
I have a customer with proseries DMS that if you clone through the program it will give you an error and we contacted intuit and went through everything and they just said it wont work. Well I tried doing multiple things, on one computer I actually had it work and that is the only machine that would copy sector by sector (it told me to do it that way). But I can't find anywhere in the cloning software where I can force a clone sector by sector I don't care for how long this will take because it saves me from reloading 30+ machines and all that jazz. So my question is simple, how can I copy sector by sector or can you not tell it to do it that way? I tried looking under manual but did not get anywhere that only controls the partitions. I can only say that I have one machine working with a sector by sector copy and this would be highly recommended to clone again that way to make sure it gets that error for license gone. But it could all be a one in a life time thing that it worked. Any help is appreciated and I hope that you can copy sector by sector (force it to anyways).
Awesome reply and this might be the only solution,
One question from what I understand a back-up image isn't bootable. So I would have to have two drives.
I am replacing the old hard drives with SSD's. And for some reason it only works with sector-by-sector (not sure why). So I would have to leave the old drive alone (we can't mess with it because if we have an issue allt he data is gone). I plug 2 crucial SSD's into the computer, back up to one. Then restore the back up to the other drives? Is it possible to restore a back up drive to it's own self? Sorry if I am a little confused. But I believe I would need two drives, but I can always reuse the second drive going from computer to computer.
Mark, as you have ATI 2020 as per using this forum, then you can create an Acronis Survival Kit which is an external USB HDD which can have a 2GB bootable FAT32 partition created at the start of the drive from which to boot into the Acronis Rescue Media, while the rest of the drive can be used to store the backup image (or images if space allows).
One advantage of using a Survival Kit drive and doing Recovery is that you can remove the good working original drive from the PC, replace it by a new blank SSD, then boot the PC from the external drive to perform the Recovery safe in the knowledge that no harm can come to the removed original drive.
The option to create a Survival Kit is only offered when you are creating a new Disks & Partitions (or Entire PC) type backup task and are setting the Destination for the task to a suitable external USB drive that can be used for this purpose.
See KB 61639: Acronis True Image: how to create Acronis Survival Kit - for more information on the process.
Also KB 61738: Acronis True Image: Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems
And Acronis Article: The Acronis Survival Kit
Another advantage of using this approach is that you can test the success of the recovery operation by disconnecting the external drive and rebooting directly from the recovered SSD in place in the PC.
The only reason that I can think of why sector-by-sector method is needed in your scenario is that there is hidden licensing or activation information stored in one of the drive sectors that isn't captured if not using this method!