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Need to clone Windows 2000 disks - any versions unusable?

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I have a customer who is having capacitor failures on the older computers on his assembly line.  He wants to buy Windows 2000 replacement computers from me but it takes him better than a day to reinstall everything on a brand new computer.  He would like to have the capability of cloning hard drives as backups once he gets one of each system set up.

I use True Image Home version 11 when I need to clone a drive - it works fine for Windows 2000 drives but I have no experience with newer versions.  Is there a way for me to get a copy of Home 11?  Or do later versions offer the same disk cloning procedure?  Does anyone else have experience cloning Windows 2000 hard drives using newer True Image vesrions?

Thanks in advance for any help, JEFF

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Jeff, welcome to these user forums.

It has been a very long time since I last used Windows 2000 but as far as I remember it has standard file systems that are still supported by the current range of Acronis True Image Home products, including the latest 2017 version released in August.

There are no current versions of ATIH that would permit the installation of the product on Windows 2000 but the offline Acronis bootable Rescue Media could be used to backup and clone disk drives used by Windows 2000 systems.

From the ATIH 2017 User Guide: 

Supported file systems

Acronis True Image for home users supports:

  • FAT16/32
  • NTFS
  • Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 *
  • ReiserFS *

    Note: ReiserFS partitions and disks cannot be backed up to Acronis Cloud.

  • Linux SWAP *

* The Ext2/Ext3/Ext4, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP file systems are supported only for disk or partition backup/recovery operations. You cannot use Acronis True Image for file-level operations with these file systems (file backup, recovery, search, as well as image mounting and file recovering from images). You also cannot perform backups to disks or partitions with these file systems.

You would need to purchase and register the license for ATIH 2017 against your Acronis account which would then allow you to download a copy of the Rescue Media as an .ISO CD image to burn on media, or else install the product on a Windows 7 or later computer and create the media directly from the application.   The default media is based on a Linux OS and works well with most hardware.

The alternative if you still have True Image 11 installed on your computer would be to create the Rescue Media with that.  You could potentially do the cloning from within Windows on the computer with TI 11.0 if you can connect the source and target drives to that system.  Perhaps an easier method would be to use TI 11.0 to create a backup image of the source Win 2000 drive to the local hard drive, then disconnect the source drive, connect the new target drive and restore that backup to the new drive.  See the TI 11.0 User Guide at http://download.acronis.com/pdf/TrueImage11_ug.en.pdf

Thanks for the reply.  I guess that's what I needed to know.  I was hoping to find someone who had used a recent version to clone an older drive, but I knew that was a longshot.

My version 11 will clone Win2K disks fine, but he needs to install something on his end that will allow him to clone his own drives and, since version 11 isn't available any longer, I guess we'll see if 2017 will do the trick for him.