Clone Disk Operation Failed T61 with windows 7 HDD
System: Thinkpad T61 6343 with TWO internal drive bays.
Acronis True Image 2011. I also have Disk Director 10.
Internal bay: 500GB HDD with win 7 only 30GB used on the disk.
Thinkpad's ultrabay: 160GB or 500GB HDD blank drive.
Advanced dock ultrabay: CDRW / DVD or DVD Multi with the Bootable - Acronis rescue disk that has True Image 2011 and disk director 10 on it.
All HDDs are regulat platter drives. They are ALl Hitachi with IBM PNs & FRUs.
The working win 7 HDD has THREE partitions on it. A 1.172GB SYS_RESERVED (essentially windows boot manager), the main OS partiton of 455 or so GB and the Lenovo Recovery partition of 10.5GB.
I boot the CD and select True Image 11.
First try was to clone to a 160GB, manual allocations. The SYS recsrved defaulted to the same size, I made sure the Lenovo recovery was at least 10.5GB and the remaining 138 or so GB was for the main OS. Remember only 30GB used on the source HDD.
It started and goes through operation 3 of 6.
As soon as it started operation 4 of 6 it put up a strange message in the progress dialog "49,710 days"
49 thousand days untill what???
Then I got the Clone Disk Operation Failed message.
Only thing I can do is power off and restart.
So I put a BLANK 500GB HDD in and re-ran it. select manual mode, and proportional (easy because the two disks are the same size).
Exact same 49,710 days and failed error on operation 4 of 6.
Both times after I re-powered the system on I went into win disk management and can SEE the SYS_RESERVED partition as a HEALTHY partition, 1.17GB.
Interestingly, that SYS_RESERVED partition is a good copy, because I put that disk into a different, Empty T61, no other HDD, no optical drive, and and powered it up.
It booted to the winblows boot manager, but couldn't go any further because it "cannot find the needed device" (that being the main win 7 OS volume!).
So it makes the SYS-RESERVED partition but dies when making the main data partition.
I then put the "new" or "target" disk in the main bay of the T61 and put the old working win 7 install in the T61's Ultrabay, and still booted from the CD in the dock's ultrabay.
Same 49,710 days and clone failed error.
I also put one of the HDDs in the dock's bay and the CD in the T61 ultrabay with the same result. I tried every possible combination of source and target disk (a few times) with the exact same result.
It is failing when trying to make the main data partiton.
Now I am not new to TI 11 and DD 10. I'm the same Mike Santos that Grover quotes / references in these three links in his posts when others have problems. I just had to start a new account because I forgot the old PW and being retired from the Army no longer have access to my us.army.mil enail that I used to use. I have a ticket in with Acronis to get my two email accts merged into one.
From GROVER:
Here is recent info about the Thinkpad. Be sure your cloninig is using the CD and clone is from usb to the computer.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/25763#comment-90112
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/26373#comment-90109
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/26434#comment-90119
END
I used this same bootable CD to make dozens, almost 100 clones of win XPP HDDs on both T30s and this same T61, so I'm pretty sure it's not the hardware, its got to be something in the software. This is my first try on cloning a win 7 HDD though.
I went through some other threads, but don't see anything with this result.
Any solutions?? Thanks.
PS since I have DD 10, its a possibility that I could copy the main data partiton (and lenovo recovery) to the new target drive, but when I tried to load DD10 from the CD, it loaded ok, but could not see the main working win 7 HDD ?????? That was strange.
Since everyone always recommends NOT running TI and DD from inside windows I haven't done that, and I don't even have it loaded on to the win 7 HDD I'm trying to clone. I could do that, but as I said you guys never recommend that.
Got my old email-reactivated, so I'm going to move this post to that account.
Mike, one of the quickest ways of get your disk copied is to use backup-restore method instead of cloning. In other words, you take a disk image of your source disk, save it into a file with .TIB extension and then deploy(restore) it to the target disk. When you will be setting up the backup, you will find "Sector-by-sector" and "Ignore bad sectors" options in backup settings. Please enable them. They will give certain level of resilience against possible environment-related issues that are out of Acronis control.
If this two-steps migration will fail at first step (saving original disk into a file), there are chances that original disk, cable or disk controller got deteriorated over time and is no longer working correctly. You can verify that by trying to use Windows native backup tool to create disk image.