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Can't restore/clone to larger drive

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I know it's tough to diagnose problems like this, but I'm hoping somebody has an idea:

We're trying to restore the backup of a 500 Gbyte drive to a new 2 Tbyte drive. Problem: the restore takes literally 2 days to complete, appears to succeed, but the restored drive is unreadable, partition not recognized. We tried it first under Windows, then from the Acronis recovery disc on another system.

Then we tried a drive-to-drive clone instead of using the backup. Same result.

We finally tried a sector-by-sector restore, which went fast and was successful. Then we just extended the restored partition to fill the new drive.

Question: Why does the regular restore (and the clone) take so long, and then fail? But the sector-by-sector restore succeeds?

Background:
Using Acronis True Image 11
Been doing successful backups to USB drive from our server system and data disks for years with no problems.
We usually do incremental backups up to about 15 levels, then start a new one.
Never had to restore a full drive backup before, but occasionally we access files successfully from the backup sets.

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Any restore of your system drive is best done when booted from the ATI Rescue Media. Data partitions might be restored within Windows (though I'd still prefer the Rescue Media), but restoring your C drive from within Windows is not recommended.

What is the size of the used space on the original HD?

What kind of backup did you create?
Was it a full disk mode backup (selected entire disk checkbox, not just individual partitions)?

Are you using version 11 or version 2011?

..

The original disk had only one partition, and a full drive backup was done. The disk space on the original drive was about 95% used.

It was version 11, not version 2011.

The operating system was WinXP.

I am guessing but my guess is that the disk had disk errors and failed due to the errors.
A sector by sector r estore would have transferred the errors onto the new disk and the transfer was just a copy rather than an intelligent read and copy.

My recommendation would be that you check all partitioons on both the old and new disk for disk errors so both disks can be verified.