Re: Issues with external hard drives

PeteK <YouHaveToBe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote

>> I've never been too keen on Ghost 9 or 10, damned buggy.

>> Try it with True Image.

>> I'd try cloning the physical drive, if that is possible in the sense that the
>> contents of Disk1 will fit on Disk2, and use True Image that I know works.
>> And use True Image off its booted Rescue CD too.

> There is a lot of truth in the above. 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,

I basically decided to bin it and use TI instead, mainly as a
consequence of having it fail to clone a drive and not being
able to image a system from the booted CD. I prefer to do
that last before doing any work on a system for safety and
Ghost 9 and 10 cant even do that at all. You have to install
it first and thats the last thing you want to do with a
system that has problems.

The same problem arises with cloning, you cant do that from
the booted CD either, and thats a complete pain in the arse
because you end up with one hell of a problem with the drive
letters when you do a clone at the XP level. And Ghost 9
failed to actually clone one of my partitions too, it just aborted.
And took longer to clone a single partition than TI took to clone
the entire physical drive too.

> 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).

Urk.

> 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.

Yeah, I've never been at all keen on that approach, I always
clone from the booted CD and Ghost 9 and 10 cant even do
that from the booted CD. Gross design deficiency in my opinion.

You can do it with the Ghost 2003 thats included on the distribution
CD but thats got its own problems, you have to be very careful
about what XP can see on the first boot of XP after the clone has
been made and Ghost 2003 is a complete dog for images on a
lan drive if the nic isnt natively supported.

> 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.

Like what ?

> It really came across as an unfinished, unreliable product.

No reason why you cant use TI 8 while the blemishes are sorted out.

The only real quirk with TI 9 that I have seen is that it has a
problem writing the rescue CD when Roxio EMC 8 is installed.
With TI8 you just had to stop Roxio DragtoDisk from running.
With TI9 I had to actually uninstall Roxio EMC 8. Havent looked
at other workarounds closely tho, I assumed that Acronis will
fix that and chose to do what ensure it works. You dont create
rescue CDs often enough to matter.

> The full-drive cloning aspect DID appear to work (event though it was supposed
> to be disabled in the evaluation copy),

Thats a bit unclear. The one I tried claimed that it could be used
for 15 days and wasnt limited at all. Turns out that it cant create
an image from the rescue CD, thats definitely disabled. Maybe
they mean that the installed copy isnt disabled, didnt bother
with that because I needed to do that from the rescue CD so
I just used a TI8 CD instead. The TI9 rescue CD can certainly
do a restore and runs fine on a dinosaur Compaq Prosignia 340
that some builds of TI8 have a problem with, basically the graphic
parts of the screen are unreadable. Just a cosmetic problem tho,
if you know what the screen should be, it still works fine.

> but I didn't want to clone the full drive, just the boot partition.

Sure, but one obvious approach is to clone the physical drive
and delete the partitions you dont want after doing that. Or do
it as a two step process, create an image file and restore that.

> 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 all who helped me out.

Thanks for the feedback, too rare IMO.


.

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