Cloning with Acronis TrueImage, any good?

Dutch Guy · 10 Dec 2008 at 13:45

I currently have a 750GB Samsung drive split into 4 partitions, XP on C: Vista on D: games on E: and the rest on F:

Can I use Acronis TrueImage to clone this drive to a new 1TB drive I will be getting soon?

Is it safe to do it and do I have to do anything special to get the system to boot from the new drive after cloning so I can format the old drive and make a new partition out of that drive?

Jumping · 10 Dec 2008 at 16:31

Acronis TI will happily clone your drive to the new drive. You will be able to boot from that drive no problems, you might have to change the boot drive order in your BIOS to point to the new drive after you cloned it.

bledd · 10 Dec 2008 at 16:33

Jumping said:
Acronis TI will happily clone your drive to the new drive. You will be able to boot from that drive no problems, you might have to change the boot drive order in your BIOS to point to the new drive after you cloned it.

yup

nice sig btw

Dutch Guy · 10 Dec 2008 at 19:39

Jumping said:
Acronis TI will happily clone your drive to the new drive. You will be able to boot from that drive no problems, you might have to change the boot drive order in your BIOS to point to the new drive after you cloned it.

I see, lets hope it works better and easier than Ghost in DOS

helmutcheese · 10 Dec 2008 at 20:01

To OP yes, simply do what it says on screen and esp part about Boot Drive at end.

bru · 10 Dec 2008 at 21:15

thread hijack

ok so is there anything to stop me using acronis trueimage to move an exisiting vista install on to a new raid 0 setup with the two new disks ive just bought.

im assuming if i set up the raid array and ensure windows has all the drivers it needs so my currant install recognizes it properly before cloneing the partition it should work...?

willy · 10 Dec 2008 at 22:30

Yeah Acronis TrueImage is really good. I've got 500gb Samsung F1 and when i made partitions, i put 50gb for OS and the rest for data, etc and after installed OS (Vista 64bit) found out that it wasn't big enough after put all the programs, etc so i used Acronis TrueImage to make clone of the data drive and then formatted and gave some hdd space to the OS hdd and restored the clone image back and it works perfectly

Mike1983 · 10 Dec 2008 at 23:36

bru said:
thread hijack

ok so is there anything to stop me using acronis trueimage to move an exisiting vista install on to a new raid 0 setup with the two new disks ive just bought.

im assuming if i set up the raid array and ensure windows has all the drivers it needs so my currant install recognizes it properly before cloneing the partition it should work...?

I'm not 100% sure on this but I don't believe it will work I'm afraid. My view / opinion is as follows which someone who understands things more may back up..

Your existing install will not have the necessary RAID drivers installed into the core files of the operating system. You could go ahead and set up a RAID volume but all Acronis will do is clone what you have now to the new RAID volume. In other words you will be cloning a non RAID setup to a RAID setup which in turn will not boot due to the lac of drivers.

Logically then you'll probably be thinking (like I did) to install RAID drivers onto your existing install first and then clone it so that when it gets installed on your RAID array then it will have the drivers installed and boot fine. I could not manage this though no matter what I tried (search for my posts) and understand it to be very difficult (impossible?) to acheive without a seperate RAID card.

You're thinking of doing what I tried to do but in the end I gave in and did what I should have done in the first place and do a fresh install.

In my opinion, you'd have a cleaner / more efficient install by starting from scratch. You can still keep your non-RAID disc available incase things go wrong

bru · 11 Dec 2008 at 00:02

Mike1983 ive been reading your posts on this very issue and I see that you ended up with a fresh install, I was really hopeing to avoid having to go down that route, but it may just be the best thing to do right from the start.

Mike1983 · 11 Dec 2008 at 00:14

Yep, I know someone managed to do it but as mentioned they needed a PCI RAID card to get it sorted.

I needed some convinving but after I'd done it's now clear to me why a fresh install is the better option. Saves time / hassle and makes sure your sstem is optimal from the start.

bru · 11 Dec 2008 at 01:00

well the 2 new wd caviar blue (WD6400AAKS) arrive tommorrow so i might have a go and see how I get on...but with being prepared to do a full install just in case

Dutch Guy · 11 Dec 2008 at 09:52

I just heard my new 1TB drive has arrived so tonight I will clone the 750GB to the 1TB drive (and thank god I don't have a RAID 0 setup)

jrodga2k5 · 11 Dec 2008 at 10:37

Dutch Guy said:
I just heard my new 1TB drive has arrived so tonight I will clone the 750GB to the 1TB drive (and thank god I don't have a RAID 0 setup)

Cool cool mate

Let me know how ya get on and what you think of the new 1TB drive, im looking to do an upgrade similar to yourself except going from a measly 250Gb to 1TB

Never used cloning programs so I assume its all pretty simple

Dutch Guy · 11 Dec 2008 at 15:22

jrodga2k5 said:
Cool cool mate Let me know how ya get on and what you think of the new 1TB drive, im looking to do an upgrade similar to yourself except going from a measly 250Gb to 1TB

Never used cloning programs so I assume its all pretty simple

I will report here so if I don't reply for a few days you can expect me to be cursing while reinstalling XP and Vista

PistolPete · 11 Dec 2008 at 18:51

bru said:
thread hijack

ok so is there anything to stop me using acronis trueimage to move an exisiting vista install on to a new raid 0 setup with the two new disks ive just bought.

im assuming if i set up the raid array and ensure windows has all the drivers it needs so my currant install recognizes it properly before cloneing the partition it should work...?

I would do it a slightly different way.
Setup the 2 disks in RAID whist booting from the existing disk. It's relatively simply to do. I went from a single disk to a pair of RAID1 disks but the principles are the same. Rather than continuing to hijack this thread if you start another I'll post the way I did it.

Dutch Guy · 11 Dec 2008 at 20:42

I did it, I started but got an error that the drive letters wer changed so I had to change the drive letters to match the partitions on the drive in order, after that I changed the partition layout on the new drive to what I wanted (totally free as long as the new one is bigger I think)

Cloning took two hours and after that I set the BIOS to boot from the new drive and that is where the fun started, I got into an endless reboot loop as Aconis kept on starting before Windows saying it was finished.

So after 4 times I disconnected the old drive and after that it would boot on the new drive.

Now I am off to see if everything works and if it does I will format the old drive and keep that as a backup drive in my computer.

frustin · 28 Dec 2008 at 10:52

you did this on a raid0 setup? i have this issue. I have a backup of the C drive (which is the raid0), stored on my D drive.

when i go into acronis recovery i cant see the C drive, presumably because it doesnt have the raid driver.

is that what you mananged to fix?