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Thread: S.O.S Disc cloning help needed

  1. #1
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    Default S.O.S Disc cloning help needed

    Hi All,
    I have 2 laptops both running XP(SP3)
    1) 2x Copies of ProScan for streaming
    2) POC32 & Acendis
    They are old clunkers but have provided a very reliable service for some years now. They have been exposed to the usual dust etc and have only been blown out with compressed air on a yearly basis.

    Recently, one has been crashing on a regular basis. I believe might be the hard drive starting to fail. I decided to replace the 80GB (pata) drive with a replacement SSD from flebay as it is reasonably priced, less heat & less power consumption.

    All this was initiated by a hard drive failure in my new (5 year old) laptop on Win7(32bit). Easy job I thought! Just clone the old SATA drive to the new SSD right; wrong; after two days and nights of trying this and that I still could not get the computer to boot. Firstly tried the “Magic” software that came with the drive, no success there so decided to image the old drive & reload it to the SSD & all working now. I still don’t understand why any of the clone software(s) failed but no matter all working now with much improved performance.

    Being so pleased with my new found skill set I have decided to upgrade all the computers with SSD. In an effort to remind myself of older technology I decided to replace the 3.5” drive in the upright PC (running Win XP32 SP3) and guess what! When I clone this drive (sata 500gb) it won’t boot either! So back to square one, image the drive and load it to the SSD, only problem here is it does not want to image. Tried my Norton Ghost without success along with numerous free softwares & still no joy. I can however load a fresh copy of XP to the SSD successfully.

    What have I missed? The problem seems to be in the boot sector so I tried to sys the drive without success.
    I need to get this machine going first (and understand how it is done) before attacking the two laptops with PATA drives.

    Are there any old blokes visiting here that still have enough grey matter left to set me in the right direction? Perhaps there is a piece of software that is a known for this application?
    Any help would be greatly appreciated.



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    Senior Member mickc's Avatar
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    Try acronis true image
    Have you tried it again after xp loaded

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    Hi Mickc,

    I have a registered version of Acronis on another PC which has both SATA & IDE ports. I have only tried to clone the drive & without success.
    A good thought though might be to image one drive then upload the image to the new SSD. I will give that a try tonight. When I try to clone the drives I get a message telling me failed to clone but no details as to why it failed.

    I have tried after loading the base copy of XP to clone the drive but without success so far.
    Many thanks for your input.
    Regards,

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    +1 for Acronis True Image.

    I've also had good success with Partition Magic.

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    LSemmens
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    As an aside: Imaging drives, whilst very convenient, may just duplicate problems that a new drive is hoping to solve.

    I am from the old school (DOS days) where to run a program you needed a "clean Slate". Given the issues you are having, it might be just faster to Start by installing your OS followed by the the apps you require. You could then plug in your old drive as a slave and copy data as needed. I just commented in another thread that it has taken me approx 8 hours to perform a full reload (including all apps and updates) of Windoze 10 on my lappy. If you spend a few hours mucking around trying to a)make and b)restore an image, your time would probably be better spent just "starting from scratch", so to speak. Of course, if you have several identical spec machines then a drive imaging program rapidly comes into its own.
    I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

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    If you trying to clone a larger drive to a smaller drive these issues can occur. You can either resize the partition so that the drive you are cloning is smaller than the ssd or Create an image of the original drive then restore the image to the SSD if this is the case.

    I use clonezilla for all my cloning needs.

  • The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to irwazza For This Useful Post:

    Tiny (05-02-16),tristen (05-02-16)

  • #7
    Crazy Diamond
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    That's spot on irwazza, most people for years have been cloning small drives to larger drives for more capacity so the clone went easy.
    When cloning to smaller capacity SSD drives for speed, the original drive will need the partition resized to just a tad smaller than the new SSD & then expand into the unallocated space with your partition tool when successful clone is finished.

    PS: I have used Acronis True Image, Partition Magic & MiniTool Partition Wizard (free version), all with success in the past.

    Only stumbling block I came across last time was Windows update not working on the clone due to File sector format differences & fixed it with Intel Rapid Storage Technology.
    Last edited by Tiny; 05-02-16 at 09:02 AM.
    Cheers, Tiny
    "You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can't make them think? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
    The information is out there; you just have to let it in."

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