Skip to main content

ATI 2010 attempt to clone system disk to external hard drive

Thread needs solution

I am attempting to clone a Windows 7 system disk to an external SATA hard disk in a USB enclosure using True Image Home 2010. The system rebooted and began the cloning process. I started the process the night before and when I went to check on it in the morning, the system was asleep. Moving the mouse and hitting the keyboard seemed to wake up the system, but the monitor is completely blank. The lights are still flashing on both drives, but there is no way to check on the progress. I am reluctant to do a hard reboot, but there is no way to know if it is still working. It had been running for about 10 hours when I last checked it. How long should I expect this process to take? Will I risk damaging the system disk if I turn off the computer?

Thanks.

0 Users found this helpful

Please search the forum for "Clone" to find the many posts outlining our recommended procedure. For example, we recommend that you clone only after booting from the ATI bootable Rescue Media, not from Windows. Also, it would be equally effective but safer to perform a full disk mode backup and restore it to the new drive, rather than to clone.

Clone should be performed only after booting from the ATI bootable Rescue Media. Also, do not allow the PC to boot to Windows with both drives still connected. But, better and safer would be to create a full disk mode backup and restore it to the new drive.

Cloning is an "all or nothing" process. If something goes wrong, the user may end up with two unbootable drives and loss of data. Backup and recovery is a far safer method, and allows for multiple tries if the user is unfamiliar. There is no advantage to cloning over backup/restore, other than some saved time but with considerable added risk.

Thanks for the response. Had I read this forum prior to attempting the cloning procedure, I would have done MANY things differently. However, I'm trying to now find the best way out of the current situation. As far as I can tell, the cloning process is still active since, after waking the system up from hibernation, the lights on both drives start flashing again. Unfortunately, there is no way to check on the progress since the monitor does not come on. So I guess I will try to keep the system awake as much as possible to hopefully allow the process to complete in a reasonable time.

But one thing I can't understand is how a failed cloning procedure can possibly result in a corrupted source drive, since the source drive is not being written to.