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Disk Clone's Unexplained Failure

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Using TI 2013 Plus Pack’s Disk Clone feature, I began cloning a hard disk containing my C: drive and two other partitions. The target disk showed continuous activity until, after about an hour, the system rebooted without explanation, despite it saying previously there were still 18 hours to go. Needless to say, nothing appears to have been transferred to the new drive (at least it’s not recognised by Window’s Disk Management except as an unpartitioned disk).

The source disk has about 300Gb in three partitions. It is a 2Tb disk. The target disk is a 4Tb external drive. The transfer was via USB3, where the PC and target disk are both fully USB3-capable.

I wasn’t around when the system rebooted, so I don’t know if an error message appeared before the reboot. Certainly no flag was returned to Windows for TI to let me know what had happened.

What is the likely explanation, and is there some way of finding out?

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Do the cloning operation from the recovery CD. When you start a clone in Windows, ATI does som preparation, but then reboots the computer into a pre-Windows environment identical to the one on the recovery CD, but stored on the system disk. To do that, it has to modify the boot records of the computer, then start the pre-boot environment. So it had potential points of failure to the operation.
When you run from the recoverey CD, you can at least verify that the pre-Windows environment, actually using Linux as the OS, can properly detect your disks.

Thanks for your response, Pat.

Are you saying that ATI modifies the MBR of my PC's boot disk before it can start cloning if I run it from within Windows? If that is true and the clone process fails, would I be left with a modified MBR, and what are the implications of that? How is your suggested approach different?

I saw in the KB that running cloning from Acronis Bootable Media is recommended, but it didn't explain why. I'll wait for your reply before attempting that.

What I don't understand is why the process ran for so long (about an hour) and showed a little progress on the progress bar. Then it rebooted and appears to have done nothing.

That is the problem: in which state will your system be if something doesn't work out with the clone...

To avoid modifications to the system disk MBR, do the operation from the recovery CD. Then Windows is completely out of the way, no changes to the MBR, etc.

In general with ATI, do the recoveries and the clones from the recovery CD. These operations are technically supported within Windows and many users (who don't post here because it is working fine) are happy with doing these operations within Windows. I'd recommend you follow the wisdom of many and just use the recovery CD for these recoveries and clones (as recommended by Acronis, BTW).

DOing backups from Windows is perfectly fine.

Thanks again, Pat. Now I understand why it may have failed: my MBR is protected under Windows and possibly at BIOS level too (I must check next time I reboot).