Viewing Cloned Drive in Windows
I mostly backup my HD by cloning the complete drive, including the disk signature. I now want to reuse one of the old HDs, but if I mount the old drive in a USB docking station, will Windows change the disk signature of the drive before I can access it ? Is there a possibility that Windows will change the signature of my current HD when I mount an older clone with the same signature in the docking station ?
I don't have ATI installed as I always carry out backups/restores using recovery/boot disks.
Ta,
Pete K
Pete, if the cloned drive you intend connecting via the external USB dock is an old clone, i.e. not the result of an immediate clone operation, then you should be safe to connect it and take a look at the contents.
It is not recommended to boot into Windows with 2 identical drives connected, but connecting the USB dock after Windows is already up and running shouldn't be an issue.
The alternative approach would be to boot from a Linux Live CD/DVD and take a look at the clone drive that way, assuming you would be comfortable to navigate around a Linux desktop and file manager. See https://livecdlist.com/ for a webpage listing lots of Live CD distributions.
Steve,
Thanks for your suggestion. I'll try looking at it on another PC - one that I know won't have a clashing signature - and if it transpires that it can be reused, then I'll mount it under windows and see what happens.
Cheers,
Pete K
After all that, the disks had different signatures anyway!.
Since the newer disk was created from the older one (the one I'm now trying to reuse) using the "Clone HD" option within the Utilities section, this seems to imply that when you choose the "Clone HD" option, ATI will not preserve the disk signature. Does anyone know if it can be forced to do so and if so, how? I've seen instructions for doing this in the context of backup/restore, but not in the context of drive cloning. Last time I cloned in this way, I had to re-register some applications - something I'd like to avoid, if possible.
Pete K
Peter, can you confirm which exact build / version of ATIH you are using? I don't remember seeing a specific 'Clone HD' option in the versions I have used, so wondering if this is an OEM version, i.e. supplied free with a hard drive purchase from WD, Kingston, Seagate, PNY etc?
With Cloning, I would personally say don't - use Backup & Restore instead, it is a whole lot safer to do and will give the exact same end result, including disk signature etc.
See post: 128231: [WARNING] CLONING - How NOT to do this!!! for why I make the above statement (based on the number of users who have got it wrong!).
Steve,
I'm using ATI 2015, build 6525. I just saw that there is a later build - 6613, in my downloads page, but it is prefixed with (undefined); not sure what that means, but I guess it would be worth a try. When I said "Clone HD", I just meant that I was using the utility program that clones whole disks, rather than the backup option. I only ever use the bootable media to run ATI; I don't have it installed under windows - haven't done so since version 9. Consequently, I can never remember the specific wording of the various screens.
I need to study the linked posts that you mentioned, but I decided to go ahead and try the backup/restore approach anyway, but ran into problems. The first was that by USB3 enclosure wasn't recognised by ATI, so I moved its HD to a USB3 docking station instead and kicked off a full drive backup. Unfortunately, it failed with I/O errors after about 40 minutes - problems writing to the destination drive. Plenty of room on the destination drive, so it wasn't that. The log contained message about Linux device 7 not being present (or similar), so maybe the drive went unready?
I can see that there are advantages to the backup-restore approach, so I'll give it anouther try. If I get more errors, I'll slap the HD into a caddy and install it internally rather than using USB.
I think I owe you a beer token or two. Thanks again for your help.
Pete K
PS: I've just returned to my downloads and it no longer says 6613 (undefined), it says 6613 (latest). !
I moved its HD to a USB3 docking station instead and kicked off a full drive backup. Unfortunately, it failed with I/O errors after about 40 minutes - problems writing to the destination drive.
Don't connect via a hub, a port in a monitor, or a USB extension cord, etc. Connect the external drive directly to a USB port on the rear of the computer case.
And, USB 3 drives may require more power than your older port can consistently deliver. In your case you're using a docking station rather than a dedicated external USB 3 HD, but perhaps this is also an issue there.
I would go further than saying that backup/restore has advantages over cloning. I'd say that almost no one should clone. I am not a fan of cloning. 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. Cloning has no advantage over full backup and restore, except a slight time saving at the expense of considerably more risk and complexity.
I'm done now, but I thought I'd report back on how it went. I followed your advice and backed up to the USB3 drive. After upgrading from ATI build 6525 to 6613, I had no drive visbility issues any more. Previously, ATI detected the drive when it was installed in the USB3 docking station, but not when I was installed in a USB3 enclosure. I'd tried two different PCs, with the same directly-connected cable in each case.
The backup went OK, but when it got to the last "2 minutes" of the validation process it seemed to get stuck. Maybe I was too impatient, but I terminated the process after twenty minutes of the "last two minutes". Unfortunately, the cancel must have cancelled the whole process, not just the validation stage, because there was no backup when I looked. I repeated the process after a powering everything off and the 2nd attempt at backup & validate was successful.
The next day, I revalidated the backup; the process took about 2 and a half hours. Then I restored the backup to the 2nd HD and that took about 4 minutes longer. I guess that the separate validation was unnecessary; presumably ATI would automatically check integrity during the restore anyway.
The final result was a cloned disk including signature. I’d previously had a failed (and then broken) Windows Update and had to perform some hairy recovery procedures, so I wanted to be sure that I had a copy of the HD before I allowed Windows Update to do its business once more (its last attempt very nearly trashed everything). Fortunately, everything was fine afterwards, but it was reassuring to be able to experiment with the cloned HD first.
I was a bit surprised that the restore operation chose to do things a sector at a time; I didn’t think I’d checked that option. I guess this is why it took longer than I’d expected.
So a big thanks to those who helped out in this and linked threads.
PeteK
Peter, thanks for giving the feedback on your progress with this issue, glad to hear that you were able to both make the backup and also to recover it to your second HDD then test this OK too.