question about cloning

**fandtm666** · 30-01-10, 07:38 PM

Ok this a new one for me so will ask for advise before going ahead.

have built a new system for a friend and the original system's drive was for her work.

Now i have built the new system with 3 hard drives in a raid setup so there is no chance of her loosing her work ( SHE is hopeless never backs up )

what i would like to know is can i clone a 40 gig drive to a 500 gig drive and have it work as it did before with all her accounting software etc working as if it was the old setup.

is hirens ghost app the best way to go

as i said never done anything like this before because i always backup daily and have redundency

**CrYpto** · 30-01-10, 08:26 PM

Use Acronis true image 2009 or later , that will do what you want.

**SystemRat** · 30-01-10, 08:43 PM

Some accounting software uses the disk volume ID as part of the license key code generation such that if you clone the content of the disk but not the volume ID the license code is invalid. I've seen this on QuickBooks but I am not sure if it applies to the current versions.

Other than calling them for a new code you could take note of the volume ID on the old drive and use this utility from Sys internals to set the old volume ID onto the new drive.

This may not be needed but if you have the problem give it a try.

**fandtm666** · 30-01-10, 09:00 PM

Originally Posted by SystemRat

Some accounting software uses the disk volume ID as part of the license key code generation such that if you clone the content of the disk but not the volume ID the license code is invalid. I've seen this on QuickBooks but I am not sure if it applies to the current versions.

Other than calling them for a new code you could take note of the volume ID on the old drive and use this utility from Sys internals to set the old volume ID onto the new drive.

This may not be needed but if you have the problem give it a try.

thanks mate for that advice , she is running myob on her system so if needed i will have a look .

**Fernbay** · 31-01-10, 04:08 AM

Mate, have a look at clonezilla.
It's a linux based boot disk & pretty bulletproof

I highly recommend it

**fandtm666** · 04-02-10, 12:12 PM

Well all done and dusted

I went with ghost on the hirens cd , because it allowed to do a 80gig onto a 500gig with out reducing the size of the new drive.I tried accronis and drive image but they both reduced the size of the new drive to that of the existing one.

A couple things i found out the hard way.

1: if going from a working single drive to a raid setup make sure you first setup the comp with raid enabled then boot the old drive so it can see the raid and wants the raid drivers.

That is because if its a single and then cloned onto raid when you try and boot the new setup it will get so far and give you a reboot loop.

2: always test brand new drives before you actually start.I had two brand spanking still wrapped 500gig drives for the raid and low and behold one was fooked and in the cloning process it would get so far and kept locking up.

3: make sure you are in a good mood before you start and if not make sure the cat is not around so it does not feel your size 10.

To SystemRat i seemed to be in luck where the volume ID was concerned as MYOB did not have any arguments .But after reading what you said i did do a test on my own system that is running QUICKBOOKS and yep it has the volume ID issue