Re: Issues with external hard drives


"PeteK" wrote: 
[...] Now that I have solved my problems, I *think*
I understand what the problems were.

First some comments on Ghost V10: I'm not at all
keen, but it was a last resort, and to its credit it DID
help me to identify the problem that has been bugging
me for weeks: corrupt registry in the copy. On the
down-side, however, it was unable to clone or backup
the active boot partition successfully. In desperation,
I tried backing up the active boot partition (instead of
cloning it) and then restoring the backup using the recovery environment on the Ghost CD. After booting from the
Ghost CD, Ghost found the malfunctioning copy of
windows on the HD and determined that the registry
was broken on the cloned disk and fixed it up (perhaps
with loss of data). Not wishing to rely upon this, I then
restored the backup that I'd just made, and having done
that, the same thing happened: corrupt registry (which
again it fixed). This gave me a working 2nd boot disk.
I booted from this secondary and then cloned the original
boot partition to a third disk. This time the cloning process
worked and I was able to boot from the latest clone.

I don't think that Ghost or Partition magic copies from
active boot drives can be relied upon.  In fact, this is why
I wanted to clone using 3 disks in the first place.

Now TrueImage. I've heard lots of good reports about this,
but when I tried an evaluation copy of version 9, I found a
number of serious errors. It really came across as an
unfinished, unreliable product. The full-drive cloning aspect
DID appear to work (event though it was supposed to be disabled in the evaluation copy), but I didn't want to clone
the full drive, just the boot partition. I killed the program
after it had cloned 2 partitions out of 5, and after a scary
hour I finally managed to get my original disk to boot again.
The bonus was that the part-cloned disk also booted. I plan
to take another look at this pruduct later, when they've had a chance to iron out the bugs. I did report the bugs to
Acronis, but didn't get any response from them (hence
the Ghost purchase).

So, my problems were not LBA-related (I hope that there
are several people shouting "I TOLD YOU SO !" at this
point) after all. Nor, were they due to broken Boot files
or MBRs. Nevertheless I've learned a few tricks from the suggestions I received here, and I am very grateful to al
l who helped me out. 


   Two comments:

   1)  You don't mention that you isolated the newly made
         clone before its 1st startup.  If you did not, that could
         account for the registry changes.  It's important that
         the new clone does not "see" its "parent" OS during
         its 1st startup or it seems to set pointers to files in
         the "parent" instead of to the identical files in its own
         file hierarchy.  Things seem to work fine until the
         "parent" OS is removed and the clone suddenly sees
         that those files have disappeared.  You can start up
         the "parent" with the new unvetted clone visible to it,
         but you cannot start up the clone with the "parent"
         visible to the clone until the clone has had its 1st
         startup in isolation.  Thereafter, the clone CAN be
         started with the "parent" OS visible, and it will see
         the "parent" as just another Local Disk with its own
         file structure.

   2)  Give Casper XP a try.  It will clone the partition that
         it is running from without having to drop down to DOS
         and without leaving Windows, it does NOT need
         .NET Framework to be installed on the system, and
         it will clone a single partition from among many, and
         it will put that single partition among many on another
         hard drive.  You can download a free 30-day trial copy
         from www.FSSdev.com/products/casperxp/ .

*TimDaniels*
.

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