Acronis True Image Home 2011 will not clone HD after reboot request

Stepen,

I hope you mean to do a backup and not a clone, right?

Select disk and partition backup, swith to disk mode (blue link in the upper right corner), select the disk you want to backup. Verify/modify your backup destination and click backup now.

No reboot is required.

I'm trying to make an image of my operating system, so that the next time that my HD gets corrupted and fails I won't have to reinstall programs, along with drivers, upgrades, etc.

Can't I do it using the following drop-downs?

Start>All Programs>Acronis>Acronis True Image Home>Tools and Utilities>Clone Disk

Does back up do the same thing, and, if so, why does the "Clone Disk" exist?

Best,

Steve

Follow-Up: I think I understand now. Clone disk merely copies partitions from one disk to another (in case you want to do backups to identically partitioned drives, e.g.), whereas backup creates the image.   Duh!  Is that correct?

Ah! There is a key difference.

A backup is a process that can be run from within Windows (no reboot), saves all the data necessary to restore the disk, and results in an archive file or a chain of archive files. So you can have multiple backup files on a backup disk to keep current with the original. You can restore older versions.

A clone is an exact copy of an entire disk. It has to be run out of windows, copies all the data on the disk, and results in a *disk* that is exactly the copy of the original. YOu cannot have multiple clones of a disk or several disks on the same disk. If you clone a 100GB disk on a 250GB disk, you get 150GB of unallocated space on the new disk. If the cloning operations is failing, you might lose some original data. If you clone again the disk later, the resulting disk loses the information of the previous clone. You cannot restore the old version.

For your case, do a backup. Click on disk and partition backup, switch to disk mode (blue link on the top right in ATI 2011), verify the destination is the one you want and click backup now. Once done, validate your backup (this verifies the integrity, but not the fidelity, of the backup). Finally, *very important*, create a bootable Acronis CD or USB flash drive, boot your computer on it, and verify you can simulate the beginning of a full restore.

When choosing a disk and partition backup, ATI does a sector-level backup. If your disk fails, you just have to put a new disk in, and restore the last (or any other) image of your OLD disk and everything comes back to where it was.

There is much more to learn about backing up and restoring.

Do your backup and recovery CD tonight! :-)

"I want to clone my system HD" "When the cloning operation begins I am prompted to restart my system ("operation paused, reboot is required") - but after I reboot nothing else happens."

Can you just answer the man's question as to why nothing happens after the user is prompted to restart the system when starting the clone process from within windows?

I had the same experience with TIH 2011 trying to clone (and I DO mean CLONE) my primary SATA HD to an identical drive under Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I had expected the system to re-boot to DOS to complete the process, but it just re-booted to the desktop. I tried it two more times and the third time was the charm. That time it re-booted to DOS and successfully cloned the drive. Why does it seem so difficult to get the cloning process started from within Windows 7? Previous versions of your software operating under Windows XP 32-bit seemed to work just fine started from within Windows.

According to ATIH2011_getstart_en-US.pdf, page 28, we should make an Acronis Rescue CD first. Then boot from the rescue CD, and run Clone Disk from the Rescue CD. This seems to be working for me. I.e., when I just tried it, I got passed the "reboot required" problem. It appears to be cloning my drive now.

It would be helpful (saving our time) for the software to tell use when booting from the Rescue CD.

I hope this helps! (And works for me.)

I have a usb hard drive containing a Win 7 Home Premimum imagebackup. TI 2011 can see the VHD files and the XML files on that disk.
I have converted the VHD files (one for each disk imagebackup) to Acronis format (4 hours) and TI is happy with those files.
Now I want to have those backup files mounted onto the new drives on this machine. It has a fresh copy of Win 7 home premium with TI2011 trail version loaded. I select the drive display and see the microsoft backup file and select the approriate drives. Tells me to reboot and after the boot I see the DOS line that the Acronis process has started. There is no activity on the machines hard drive nor any activity on the usb backup drive for two hours. What's wrong here?

Joseph,

I guess you mean you want to restore, not mount.

You should restore from the ATI recovery CD.

You have probably 2 TIB files. One for the system reserved partition (a smaller TIB file) and one for the C:\system partition (a bigger one). This is because Win 7 backup creates 2 VHD files.

You would need to restore first the smaller one, leaving a 1MB space before the partition. Then restore the bigger one, and the MBR+Track0.

As you do this restore, your fresh copy of Win 7 will be erased and replace by what is in the image. You can restore to another disk, but do not reboot the computer with 2 disks and Win 7 installed on both. Restart the computer with only the disk you will want to boot on later. Make sure it works. Then reboot on the Win7 installation DVD and choose install, repair startup so that your MBR is properly set up to boot in any Win 7 if you want to do so.

I'm facing the same problem with cloning a HDD on my laptop. I'm using Acronis True Image Home 2011 Update 2 (build 6868).

I am trying to replace my existing 150GB internal HDD with a 500GB internal HDD. I have the new HDD installed in an expansion bay. I managed to run Clone Hard disk and complete the configuration. Then it requested a reboot. After reboot it went straight into Windows XP and nothing happens. I did this many times with the same result.

Please help. Thanks.

EDIT: I've been trying to clone my HDD by selecting from Tools&Utilities --> Clone Disk and it kept failing. In my latest attempt I launched True Image Home and select Tools & Utilities from within the program and it requested reboot but now with a button to click to reboot. It seems to be working after the reboot. For those who encountered such problem you may try this. I will update if the cloning process fails. As of now.. it's 65%.

Thanks.

Melvin,

To clone it is best to put the old disk in the bay and the new disk at the same spot the old disk was. Then boot on the Acronis recovery CD and clone from the old to the new (be careful: on the CD the drive letters are not the same as in windows. Pay attention to labels and sizes. Also you should clone manually so that you can tell ATI to resize only the user partitions and not the system reserved, OEM or other recovery partition.

my existing hard drive is on the way out as some of my computer diagnostics had confirmed so had to quickly buy acronis and hope i could succesfully clone my poor dying hard drive but ran into one problem after the other

well had the same problem the same as someone on here, kept trying to clone but kept rebooting with nothing happening luckily I found the solution here......I made a rescue bootable disc and ran the clone operation from there and so far so good, thanks to that person kind enough to help by suggesting this x.

dont know what to do now just had a fail message now it's advising me to use a check disc utility and create a back up of the disk...help feel like tearing my hair out!
went back and did the repair c drive for errors and tried again still backing up at the mo so far so good.

I have a drive that is going bad and am trying to clone it to a bigger drive. This Hp laptop
has no option for a second drive internally . I am using the etsata cable to the new drive and its working.
Every time I try to run the clone process it runs a little while then jumps out . No messages that anything is happening. I have tested that I can read an write to the new drive by copying a file to it and reading it.

Charles,
Follow the steps as in post #9 or look at link #3 below and follow the steps listed for item 1--Restore to Smaller or Larger disk.

1. Do the procedure when booted from the TI Recovery CD.
2. Put the new disk inside the computer attached to the same connectors.
3. Use the TI utility--Add new disk option. The new disk does not need to be pre-partitionedd.
4. Do the restore or clone.
5. shutdown and reboot with ONLY THE NEW DISK ATTACHED.