Partition Cloning Is Driving Me Mad

[chris18]

I have been trying to clone my XP Pro+SP1 MBR NTFS partition to a new drive to avoid having to start from scratch.

I used XP Disk Management to create the NTFS partion and then tried the following to clone the partition across.

Samsung Disk Manager utility
Western Digital Data Lifeguard
These two are more or less the same Ontrack product just different names.

Acronis PartitionExpert
Acronis TrueImage
Ghost 2003

The first attempt with the Samsung software was to another new 120Gb drive and the cloning seemed to work other than getting a file writing error for sccbase.dll. The new drive booted up and worked fine for a couple of days until I installed an update to my anti-virus. After that it became very unstable with numerous reboots being required to get XP running.

The Western Digital seemed to work although it gave the same file writing error for sccbase.dll but when I tried to boot with as my master I got to the blue screen with windows XP (before the Welcome screen) and it hung with all attempts to get past it failing.

Both Acronis programs and Ghost failed during the cloning process with the last Ghost log file showing

Date : Mon Nov 1 17:35:02 2004
Error Number: (29004)
Message: Read sector failure, result = 1, drive = 0, sectors 1632103 to 1632167
Version: 2003.775 (Aug 14 2002, Build=775)
Command line arguments: -igb -sgb -wizard -clone,mode=pcopy,src=@GF006e5caa-fb6e-42c4-a305-729ad830c04e:63,dst=@GF6990ca2c-f89e-47ac-a95b-31a817617c4e:63 -ghwrap
Active Switches :
AutoName
Sure
ProgMode : PROG_LOCAL
PathName : 3079 sccbase.dll

When Ghost failed and the system rebooted I got masses of error messages saying Replacing Invalid Security ID with Default Security ID Replacing Invalid Security ID with Default Security ID and Recovering Orphaned File.

I've now been trying this for a couple of days and gettting nowhere. I'm reasonably sure that sccbase.dll is the culprit but have no idea why or how to cure it.

I've tried to clone two separate versions of my XP system, the original on a 60GB drive and the cloned one mentioned earlier on the 120GB drive. I get the same problem with both.

I even tried a very old 4GB drive version with Ghost just for fun. This seemed OK, no errors, but failed to initialize XP properly stalling on the blue screen.

I've done cloning before using XP and never had a problem.

Can anyone offer any help before I give up???

[pip22]

You shouldn,t be using any software other than the cloning or imaging application - and I use TrueImage for this, it's excellent.
Having created the image - which can't be saved on the source or target partitions - you then restore it to the new drive and TrueImage will automatically re-size if source and target are different sizes. You don't even need to create a partition on the new drive as restoring the image does this (since the image is in fact a partition itself). Forget about the disk management software and try it again with just TrueImage.

[chris18]

pip22

Thanks for the info. After much head scratching and copious glasses of whisky I came across a thread elsewhere that endorsed your support for TrueImage. However, it added that doing a disk-to-disk clone with TrueImage was more likely to succeed than other methods i.e partition-to-partition or Ghost.

Nothing ventured I decided to plough ahead and did a straight disk-to-disk transfer. Lo and behold it actually worked!

Never used Acronis before but have to say that I'm suitably impressed. PartitionMagic and Ghost were what I always used in the past, before going to XP, but both, from I've read, seem to have some issues, or at least some people haven't found them not to work as described at all times.

My entire primary drive was mirrored on the slave and what's more when I swapped them over the "cloned" drive booted up without a hitch.

Only snag was that it had automatically created partitions in sizes relevant to the originals which wasn't quite what I wanted.

If I'd had the chance to read your reply beforehand I might have gone down the image road as you suggested, I could then have sized the partitions as i wanted.

I'm now looking at PE to see if I can work out how to resize the partitions to how I want them. Initially I had PE setup for automatic mode but have now found my way to manual mode and this seems to give better options.

I did try a resize in automatic mode but having committed the change PE gave an error that it could find Disk 0 on reboot and the change wasn't implemented. Not sure what that means, I did have the same error when trying partition-to-partition. Any ideas!

At the moment I have four partitions ( one primary and three logical) on my new master 9200GB) and three (primary-logical-primary) on the slave (120GB). I used XP to create the last partition on the slave and it only gave the option for primary...not sure why.

I want to reduce the partitions on the master to three and just have two on the slave one of which I'd like to be 80GB or thereabouts as I want to use it for processing video files.

Any further help you can give would be much appreciated.

[chris18]

Quick follow up to say that I'm getting the hanfg of resizing partitions with Acronis PartitionExpert.

Once I'd set it to manual mode it made life much easier and I'm gradually getting to where I want to be.

Beginning to become quite impressed with Acronis software.

[pip22]

Glad your making progress. Just want to add that in reply to your remarks that XP would only let you create a Primary partition on the slave, perhaps it's not capable of creating extended 'container' partitions. In any case, you can have up to four primaries on the same drive and that will keep the drive letters in a clear sequence, whereas the addition of logical partitions messes up the sequence in Windows Explorer so you don't really know which partition is on which drive. It took me a while to realise that!