Clone Hard Drive Mess

[Markmed]

I tried to clone a 60GB to a new 320GB hard drive with Acronis 10True Home. I tried 4 times and each time Acronis put the D:/ drive( Recovery) in front of the C:/ drive(OS) and it would not boot when installed into computer. Acronis deleted everything on original 60GB drive and now when it's connected via USB "My Computer" does not recognize it. How can I get it to be an external drive??

[glc]

Open Disk Management, partition and format it.

Acronis should not have done that if you had done it correctly. When partitions are involved, you have to use the expert mode to verify it's going to do exactly what you want, including NEVER do anything to the source drive - and you should NEVER clone a drive in Windows, you should ALWAYS use the boot media.

[alfie2]

Markmed:

all cloning softwares does what you wrote, they dont clone the drive letters properly.
for proper drive letter, you have to use a program from MICROSOFT called "sysprep"
which make the necessary changes to the original drive in order for it to be copied properly,
but
and a BIG BUT,
there is a better solution to this, if you are comfortable with CLI and LINUX,
download a KNOPPIX LIVE-CD, version 6.0 currently, me think.
use the program called "dd_rescue" clone the drive, takes 30-45 minutes for a 60Gb drive.
afterward, just boot up a CD with WINDOWS xp in it, go to repair console and do a "fixmbr"
the drive will boot up fine, I've done it many times, even from a PATA ide drive to a SATA2 drive,works prefectly.

NOTE: you can also use" dd-rescue" to clone your 60GB drive to a new drive housed in an external USB case.

do a Google search on "dd_rescue"......lots of examples.


HTH

[RayH]

What I do is make an image of the original C:\. I use imaging software (from the boot media) to restore it to the new partition.