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Disk Cloning Problems...

J

jasonlitka

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 12, 2001
Messages
3,794
So far today I've spent about 5 hours trying to migrate my HTPC from a 200GB drive to a 320GB. I don't want to reinstall so I was just trying to clone the first disk to the second and expand the partitions.

The first attempt was with Ghost 10. This didn't go well at all. Compared to the older versions of Ghost, this one seems completely determined to be a snapshot-only program and not a cloner. I found a section that let me copy individual partitions but the disk ended up not booting, even though I checked the option to copy the MBR.

The second attempt was with a trial version of Acronis True Image 9. This one seemed to have more promise because it actually rebooted the system and coped the entire drive over 4 steps (the first for setup of the new drive, the second and third to copy data, and the last to write the MBR). This try started to boot but when it got to the point where it should log in, it just started playing the "Log in", "Log out" sounds over and over.

The third attempt at drive migration was a copy of Ghost 8.3 that I found on a "Utility Boot CD". This one took forever (as the older versions of Ghost were prone to do), but I ended up with the same result as with True Image trial version.

I used to work for a K12 school district and I never had this problem cloning Windows 9x and NT4 systems. What has changed? What am I doing wrong? Can anyone help me out here?
 
No thoughts as to why I'm having problems?

In any case, I hooked both drives back up to my workstation this morning and am currently copying the drive with dd. With any luck, this will do it. If it does, I'll use parted to expand the second partition to fill the drive.
 
I've never used Ghost nor True Image, but I've used the trial version of Migrate Easy to clone my primary disks on two different machines. The last was replacing a 36G scsi drive with a quieter 73G drive. Worked just fine both times...
 
I've used Ranish and a Partition Magic 8. Both get the job done for me.

I've tried Ghost (not sure what version) but didn't get anywhere with it.
 
I use ghost 2003, and have never had a problem. Are you going from IDE to SATA? it could be a driver issue that you are encountering.
 
I still use Gost 2003 for cloning using PCDOS from Norton stiffy only, so no reboot to windows.....From above, I"ll stick to 2003 Gost then.

I never had problems until this weekend. I bought two 300GB seagate disk drives with intention of upgrading C-Drive from 120GB to 300GB, as well as a backup also 300GB.

Everything went well on 1st disk, Gost report it as new, I made it Gost ready as requested,
wait for it to clone entire disk, switch off PC, connect 2nd 300GB disk to IDE2.

Strange, this time the disk was not reported as new[???], continiue cloning, no problem so far, switch off when finished. Then I upgraded a 2nd disk from 40GB to the 120GB[Used original C-Drive disk[A bit risky but I trust Gost].

I then connect those two 2ndary drives and clone the 120 from 40GB...No problem.

When finished, I connect everything [2nd 300GB as new C-Drive with OS], and boot.
1st problem:NSW & NIS disabled...Connect to internet and reregister...
Norton System Works 2005, no problem.
2nd Problem:NIS refused, and I got the MAXED out message.

I then got MAD, but later realised, I made TWO changes in fact at once, and althow Windows had no problem with it, Sysmatec had.

Selution: To make a long story short, I revert to 1st 300GB disk, and replaced original 40GB, luckily not erased, and boot, login and updat Norton NSW & NIS...OK.
Then I replaced the 2ndary disk 40GB with 120GB.

Lesson:If I had logged in with 1st 300GB disk also, my setup would have been messed up, leaving me with to rebuy NIS 2006 which I just bought a month ago, or some tweeaking ..

Question then:Why should Symantec worry of two disk replacements on one go, while Microsoft has no problem with it ?
 
The disks were both SATA and both made by Western Digital. The first was an SATA1 200GB drive and the second was an SATA2 320GB drive.

In any case, dd did the trick. I used that to make an exact copy of the drive (it took almost 5 hours) and then after verifying that it would boot correctly, I expanded the data partition to use the rest of the drive.

Thanks all for the suggestions. I'll take a look at some of those programs for the next time I need to clone a drive.
 
litkaj said:
Oh... That I didn't know... I suppose it only works with WD drives, right?
Click to expand...
afaik, all you need is a single WD drive in your system.
 
It's a little late at this point, but my guess was you were using Ghost the wrong way. I really have no idea why it suddenly became a Windows app, or why people insist on bucking tradition and using it inside of Windows. Ghost should be used as the DOS file, ghost.exe or the PE environment file, ghost32.exe. I run ghost.exe from a bootable USB drive, or ghost32.exe from ERD Commander, and never have an issue.
 
Ghost 10 I used inside of Windows because it didn't tell me to reboot. True Image rebooted my system and cloned the drive on the next startup, at the same time that a scandisk would have run. Ghost 8.3 was run off of a bootable CD. All 3 programs and all 3 methods failed miserably...

In any case, as I said, a combination of 'dd' and 'parted' worked perfectly (albeit a bit slowly).
 
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