Clone: Cannot select new SSD drive

PV,

Please see KB document: 56634: Acronis True Image 2016: Cloning Disks and check the following requirements are satisfied.

Source and target disks must have equal logical sector size. Cloning to a disk with different logical sector size is not supported. E.g., you can clone a 512 bytes/sector disk to 512 bytes/sector disk; you can clone a 4096 bytes/sector disk to 4096 bytes/sector disk; but you cannot clone a disk with logical sector size 512 bytes to disk with logical sector size 4096 bytes.

If your source and target disks do have different sector sizes then you can use backup and restore to achieve the same result instead of using cloning.

Thanks Steve.

Using MSINFO, the three parition source HD with WINXP bootable source AND the new SSD drive are both 512 bytes/sector.

The True Image program cannot select the SSD drive for cloning although it shows up in the list of drives.

I also tried Macrium Reflect free version and it allows me to start the cloning process, but it fails with a write 22 error at 1%.

I've been trying to do this around the clock for three days now using every setting I can from boot enviroments.

Win7 disk manager shows the SSD drive as 447GB unallocated.  Each time I fail a cloning pass, I use Win7 Disk Manager to remove the partion which got written by the cloning software prior to failing.

I'm starting to get the impression the SSD disk is now damaged.  I've put more activity on it in three days than I would in three years.

I've been trying to figure out how the backup/restore works and it's elusive to me so far.

I think I understand I need to create an image.  I read the instructions but still do not understand it.

I have a 300Gb mech HD with three partitions.  I assume this much data needs to be written to a DVD disk?

Do I create three images, or can I get an image of the whole disk?

Do I then try to restore this image after creation to the SSD?

I would suspect the New PNY 450GB SSD has a problem if you are getting problems with Macrium as well as Acronis.

Have you just tried doing a full NTFS format of the new SSD from within Windows to see if it can be fully formatted, if it fails that test then I would go for a refund.

In terms of doing a backup and restore, that is pretty straight forward and can be done all from within Windows.

Create a full disk backup (all partitions) of your Seagate SATA HD, including any hidden System Reserved partition and store this on an external drive or a second internal drive, whatever you have available.  The image size will be approximately 70% of the total data size from all the partitions.  I would not recommend trying to put this on DVD's as you will need a very large stack!

Once you have the backup image, then connect the target drive (SSD) to your system along with the backup storage drive, then use Acronis running in Windows to do a full disk restore of the backup image to the target drive.

See the ATIH 2015 User Guide for Recovering partitions and disks - the important point here is to select the entire disk (not individual partitions) for recovery.

I have repartitioned the new SSD several times between clones.  Seems to do so without complaint from Disk Manager.

One guess I have is the software will not allow selecting a drive as the destination which is identified as "Primary Master"? I don't know what to do about that.

I was hoping to avoid purchasing another HD for this migration.

I'll try paritioning the SSD to NTFS and use that as the image destination for now and get another SSD sometime in the future when I can afford it.

-Pv-

chkdsk reports there are no file or sector errors on the drive.  4096 bytes in each allocation unit.  I still do not understand why True Image can see the drive exists, but will not allow it to be selected as destination.  Even if i remove the partition with Disk Manager, and unallocated id displayed, the program flags the drive as Primary Partition.  Any way to get rid of that?  I've tried a few things I found by searches, not nothing worked so far.

I'm leary of trying clonezilla.  THe UI seems very prone to making mistakes and even the online tutorials are confusing.  Also, I don't see and boot media installer/creator for Windows in the downloads.

Although my mainboard is SATA II and the drive is rated SATA III, my understanding is SATA III drives are backward compatable.

-Pv-

I can only suggest trying the option to do a backup image then restoring this to the new drive and see if that allows you to select it for the restore first of all, and if it does, if it then allows you to complete the restore operation successfully?

I purchased Casper 8 and using all default settings, that program fully cloned the new SSD to a fully working disk with resized partitions in 45 minutes.

The True Image 2015 license and download provided by SNY with their disks is junk.  Total waste of three days messing around while computer was unusable booted in the restore enviroments.

Why it is junk?

Although the program could see the new SSD disk and list it as a disk installed on my system and despite the disk having no defects and was bytes/sector compatable with the original source disk, it could not be selected as a destination drive.  The many hours spent trying to diagnose the problems with the disk (sector scanning, repartitioning, etc.) and turns out there were no problems with the disk was a monumental waste of time.  In addition, if I HAD been able to use the program, the additional disk space the new disk provided would have been unusable since the program does not permit resizing the partitions.

I am thoroughly discouraged from having any confidence in this company's products while admitting it likely works for enough people under select conditions they can make some use of it.  The trial however does not represent SNY or Aconis favorably in my case.

-Pv-

Pv, I am sorry to hear that you could not get the ATIH 2015 PNY software to work for you, but glad to hear that you have found a solution to this problem using Casper 8.

Unfortunately, this is just a user forum and like yourself, I am just another user of Acronis products with no direct access to the key Acronis developers who could possibly explain why your PNY drive was not permitted to be selected as the target for the clone operation.

Further, the OEM branded versions of Acronis products bundled with disk drives, like PNY or WD or Seagate etc are sometimes less functional than the full version Acronis equivalent products, and support for those products is with the OEM company that provides them, not with Acronis directly.

I personally think this approach is short-sighted and does no favours for either customers like yourself, or for Acronis, as often, as you have experienced, the end result is less than satisfactory, and Acronis have lost a valuable customer for their future products too.

I can only suggest that you use the Feedback tool within the Acronis product Help section to make your dissatisfaction known directly to Acronis.

Ditto to Steve's note.  The vendor provided versions are often outdated to begin with, don't get support directly from Acronis (up to the vendor to provide it) and don't have direct upgrade paths for newer versions (unless you buy a more recent version upgrade from Acronis).  

For instance, Win10 support didn't come until the last version release of 2015 which is version 6613.  There's a good chance that whatever came with your product is an older version and not likely to work well in Windows 10 (not sure of your OS).  Quite possibly, it's an earlier version with additional known bugs and problems that were fixed in later versions of 2015 as well.  Also, it is missing all of the upgrades and support found in the latest version of 2016 which has continued to bring stability and additional hardware and driver support out of the box.  

A nice touch would have been a warning message informing the user about the problems associated with dissimilar logical sector sizes before allowing the cloning to take place.

See KB 45437: Acronis True Image Does Not Clone Drives with Different Logic Sector Sizes

Note also that this topic was dealing with an OEM version of Acronis True Image (provided by PNY with their hardware), so see also KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to such software products.