Cloning Drive in Windows 7 64bit
After reading the forums here, I'm getting a little nervous about buying Acronis.
All I'm really looking for here is a reliable product to clone my hard drive and store it away incase of future disaster..:)
I'm running Windows 7 64 bit and have a 340gb cable drive and want to clone it to a 1tb sata drive. Is this new version I can download from the site going to do that or are all the negatives I'm reading here going to cause problems?
I realize this may have been asked a million times, but just looking for some of you more experienced users for your thoughts.
Thanks in advanve for any advise...:)
You will not know until you try it ... that's why a Trial version is offered. If you do try it, you want to make an Image (also called Backup) not Clone. By making an Image instead of Clone, you can store more than one Image on the 1Tb, something you may want to do as your source drive changes.
I have used various Acronis products for years and cloned many XP machines after running sysprep and sometimes not running sysprep. I purchased True Image Home2010 (on the promise that it was W7 ready) and tried to clone a Windows 7 64x hard drive (wanted to move from a 320GB to 1TB hard). It was a disaster. The cloned drive kept saying Windows needed to be repaired but never went far from that point. I gave up. Hopefully there is an answer somewhere.
Hello all,
Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.
Let me shed some light on your concerns.
Mel, in your case it'll be more reliable to create a backup rather than to use a clone tool. The Backup wizard of Acronis True Image creates an image file for backup and disaster recovery purposes, while the Disk Clone tool simply copies/moves the entire contents of one hard disk drive to another. Here's how both tools work and when you should use them.
When you create an image with Acronis True Image, you get an exact copy of your hard disk, a disk partition or individual files or folders (you make this choice when you create an image archive). If you choose to back up a hard disk drive or a partition, then every portion of the hard disk that has data written to it (sectors) is saved into a compressed file - or multiple files if you prefer. You can save this image to any supported storage device and use it as a backup or for disaster recovery. (Note: if Acronis True Image cannot identify the file system, it creates a sector-by-sector image of the disk. This image is not compressed and the image file will be of the same size as the disk being imaged.)
Dan, could you please clarify a few things?
- Did you use Acronis to clone your drives within Windows or using a standalone bootable CD;
- Please download Acronis Report utility and run it, create a report and attach it to your reply.
We are looking forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.
Thank you.
I'm also running Windows 7 64-bit. I wanted to clone my 1 TB C: drive to a new 1.5 TB and use the new one as a replacement. I'm using Acronis 2010 build #7046 as I hate the menu system on 2011.
Running Acronis from Windows, when I chose clone and Automatic, I got the Clone error.JPG shown in the attachment. Note that my destination is larger, not smaller. By experimenting, I used Manual and the only option that worked was "As is." The clone was successful but it left 0.5 TB unallocated. In other words it cloned my new HD to 1 TB; the same as the source.
To recover the space, I used Windows 7 Manage (Right mouse on Computer) and Disk Storage. It showed three partitions; System, data, and unallocated. I right-moused in the data and selected Extend Volume which added the unallocated space to it; thus restoring the new HD to 1.5 TB.
When I removed my original 1 TB and replaced it with my cloned 1.5 TB, my computer wouldn't boot; instead it asked for bootable media. I tried my old drive again as well as other know good drives but none would boot. I checked the BIOS and it was correctly configured to boot. Finally I disconnected my other drives (a 2nd internal, a USB, and an eSATA). Then it booted. Apparently Acronis did something in the other drives. After running Windows with the cloned drive, I shut down, reconnected the other drives and booted up fine. Scary for a while but eventually successful.
