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A question for any ACRONIS users
Likes # 0
Posted February 14, 2013 at 12:55PM
Hi, my WD SATA 500GB HD (2 years old) is showing signs of going belly up sometime soon. I've run a diagnostic and I'm being told it can probably be fixed. However they are telling me to back-up the drive because there maybe some data loss. They've given me free ACRONIS cloning software. The disk to be cloned is 240GB of data, I want to move it to an external IDE drive. The external drive is 1T of which only 833GB is used.
My Question is...
Can I move the cloned image to this drive without it overwriting the data already there. Or does the drive it's moved to have to be empty?
ASAP Please, every second lost is a second closer to my breakdown!
Likes # 1
Posted February 14, 2013 at 1:18PM
A clone is an exact duplicate (identical twin) of another drive. So that doesn't seem to be what you want.
With Acronis you can make an image file of your complete sata drive 'Mybackup.tib' and store the file on your ext ide drive. You also need to burn to DVD/CD the Acronis boot disc - in the options choose the full version - which will contain the full acronis program and burn it to the boot disc.
To restore the image to a brand new internal empty sata harddrive, you put the boot cd/dvd in the tray, power down and with the pc powered off you connect your ext hard drive (that contains the backup.tib) switch ext drive on and then power up pc and boot from the Acronis disc and follow the on screen prompts.
I suggest you make more than one backup image .tib and store on ext ide drive, but that's just me, belt and braces.
If you want to clone you will have to connect your new empty sata hard drive and then choose the clone option.
Likes # 0
Posted February 14, 2013 at 1:23PM
I'll redo that last sentence
If you want to clone you will have to connect your new internal empty sata hard drive and then choose the clone option. When it is cloned, power down and take out your old C: drive and connect the cloned drive in it's place and then when you switch pc on your clone is now the C: drive
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Posted February 14, 2013 at 1:29PM
240gb plus 833gb adds up to more than 1Tb
you only have about 100gb usable spare space left on your external drive.
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Posted February 14, 2013 at 1:34PM
Hi lotvic
Thanx for that, much appreciated, but could I ask one more question? My PC only has 1 HD at present and all my spare and external drives are IDE's. as I've only ever installed IDE drives in PC's and changing them from 'Master' to 'Slave' etc. But not knowing anything about the machinations of SATA connects.
My Question is:
If I install a new disk in with the old one, do I have to set it as slave?
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Posted February 14, 2013 at 1:37PM
Hi lotvic
My mistake I have 833 GB free of 931 GB
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Posted February 14, 2013 at 1:52PM
SATA doesn't use master /slave
machine will look for boot files on the drive in the lowest numbered sata port and then work through the ports until it finds a bootable drive.
So c: drive with the op system is plugged into sta0 port
more op systems can be on any other drive but the boot files will be on c:
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Posted February 14, 2013 at 2:35PM
Thanx for that Fruit Bat /\0/\, i'm glad to see they've moved on from the IDE fiddling about.
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Posted February 14, 2013 at 6:59PM
Yes no more fiddling with jumpers, with sata it depends on which port on the motherboard you plug it into.
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Posted February 14, 2013 at 7:06PM
don't know what's wrong with me today, keep posting before I've finished...
I just wanted to add that a backup.tib file is just that, a file (compressed - Zipped up) and can be moved or copied like any other file.
Afterwards (and nothing to do with restoring image to a new hard drive that will become C:) if Acronis program is installed on C: you can mount the backup.tib and explore it's contents, just remember to unmount it when finished.
Likes # 0
Posted February 14, 2013 at 9:44PM
Or forget about faffing about with cloning and just make a new folder on your existing/new drive and drag and drop your files from the old drive onto the new. Use Teracopy to replace the existing Windows copy mode. It does a far better job of copying.
