Adventures With Cloning

Adventures In Cloning
I’m writing this with the hope that the lessons I learned cloning my C: drive to a new, larger drive on my CF-29 will help others do it better. I also hope that fellow members who are experts will add to this thread and explain the problems I ran into. At one point I was not sure I could do it. Ultimately I was successful but the exercise was not without frustration and confusion.

My inexperience was not the only cause of my troubles. The documentation of the process is not complete and assumes a level of expertise I did not have. This led to a crucial mistake that could have been easily avoided with better documentation.

Here was the situation. I had the stock 40 GB hard disk in my CF-29 that I wanted to replace with a bigger disk. The machine is running XP Pro, SP-3. I wanted to avoid reinstalling all the software for which I did not have CD’s specifically for the CF-29. I bought the machine used from Bob Johnson’s Computer Shop, who is active with Toughbook’s, so if I needed to reinstall, I’m sure I could have obtained the necessary CD’s. This machine and software is fully licensed and legal. But, cloning seemed to be the better option. I’m basically lazy.

I chose a Hitachi 100 GB Travelstar for the new drive. I also bought a USB outboard adaptor to hold the new drive for cloning. I planned to use Norton Ghost running from Windows for the cloning process.

I installed the new drive in the adaptor, connected the USB, and found that My Computer did not register the new drive. The Disk Manager did see it and called its space “Unallocated”. I thought that in order for My Computer to recognize the drive, I needed to format it. Ghost tells me that I don’t need to format prior to cloning. I ignored this because I wanted to be sure My Computer knew about the new drive before I started to clone.

So, in the Disk Manager, I requested to NTFS format the drive. One of the choices I was given was to make it a Primary or Secondary partition. Since I wanted this disk to be bootable, I chose Primary. I did not realize that I did not have to choose either. This was the crucial mistake I made and it took a lot of trouble to correct it. I then formatted the drive. It now showed up in My Computer and in the Disk Manager as a Primary partition. Good, I was on my way.

I stopped all processes showing up in the Task Manager Applications window and disabled the Wi Fi receiver. I wanted nothing to interfere with the cloning process. I ran Ghost, selected the appropriate options including copying the Master Boot Record (MBR), and started the cloning process. Thirty minutes later, Ghost informed me the cloning process could not be completed and gave me some obscure error codes. Since my computer does not allow booting from a USB port, I could not test the copy without actually installing the new drive in place of the old one. This means I would have to disassemble the disk caddie. I did not want to do this yet.

So, I ran Ghost again. Same result; same error codes (definition of insanity). Not good. This time I decided to try the cloned drive in the machine. So I disassembled the caddie, removed the old drive and installed the new one. That was fun!! The caddie is definitely designed to not be messed with. But, using care, it can be done without destroying the foam padding.

The cloned disk actually got into Windows but stopped before the desktop appeared and seemed to go into a loop. It went no further. This was a no go. Now, I had to reinstall the old disk in the machine. After a while one gets better at dealing with the caddie. The machine was back to normal. I now was back to the starting point with absolutely no idea of how to proceed.

In desperation, I did a Google search on the error code. Google is wonderful. It found hundreds of references. It turns out that this error code covers a multitude of sins. I read about 25 references before I found a problem description that seemed to match my situation. It seems that when I formatted the new drive I should not have chosen either a Primary or Secondary partition. That made sense after I thought about it. I went into the Disk Manager and deleted the Primary partition which was now reported as “Unallocated”. I cloned again. Thirty minutes later Ghost completed with no error messages!!! Yes!!!

But, the world was not yet right. Disk Manager now reported that the new drive had TWO new partitions. One contained the contents of the old disk and was exactly the same size as the old disk. The other was the remainder of the new disk which was reported as “Unallocated”. Something had to be done to recover the remainder of the new disk. At this point I had no idea if the cloned disk would actually boot.

I needed to combine the two partitions. Windows has no facilities to combine partitions. So, I installed an old friend; Partition Magic. This program will combine partitions which I did. When it finished, My Computer and Disk Manager showed a single100GB disk space with all the contents of the old drive just as you would expect. Things were looking up. Now, will it boot? Only one way to find out.

Out came the caddie. Out came the old drive. In went the new drive. In went the caddie (you all must be laughing at me by now). On went the power. Anndd, up came XP in all its glory. The machine worked perfectly. Whew!!

Question for the experts: Why, after I removed the original partitions, did the cloning not account for the full size of the new disk? Why did I have to combine partitions to reclaim the full disk space?

Sparky

 

You can use the acronis disk director suite to reclaim the remaining unallocated space to its full space. Its true that the drive must not be formatted prior to cloning the cloning software will take care of it. It will automatically formatted but it supposed to ask you for parttion or just one partition. I always use the acronis true image even if your harddrive has a partition on it it will be destroy and create a new one.

BTW, Its good for you to know how easy to disaasemble and reassemble the harddrive caddy. its a like a practice and for next time its a piece of cake. Lol


ohlip

 

I'm not sure what version of Ghost you had, but I've used Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition and its related variants that include GhostCast. I also run the client in DOS, which probably makes a difference in options, too. When imaging to a different size hard drive or partition, I know at least that version of Ghost has an option to change the size of the destination partitions to be written (shrink if there is enough free space, or grow to use unallocated space if supported by the file system type). If doing a disk image with multiple partitions, you could even grow some, shrink others, and leave the rest unchanged in size.

If doing a disk image, the existing contents of the drive shouldn't matter--the partition table will be overwritten. (As you saw, copying the boot sector is a separate option that has to be selected.) Partition images have to be able to "fit in," to one degree or another, with the destination drive's partition structure (there is a little bit of latitude depending on what you are trying to do).

For partition creation/deletion/resizing/reorganization, I used to use Partition Magic, but I have found that the Open Source-based Parted Magic has been able to handle those tasks.

In short, to briefly answer the question of partition sizing when imaging, at least the more advanced versions of Ghost have a configuration option.


Matthew

 

HI Mathew,
I am using Ghost 12.0 which is not the latest version. It's about 2 years old. Is the copy option you are talking about called "Resize drive to fill unallocated space"? If so, I did not select this option because I did not really understand what it meant.

Sparky

 

Yes, the "Resize drive to fill unallocated space" option will automatically expand to fill any remaining free space on the destination drive, such as when the destination drive is larger than the source drive. I suppose you may have seen the disk-to-disk imaging HOWTO such as is posted here on Symantec's website.

To clarify what I was referring to using, there are essentially two product lines within the Ghost family--a corporate/enterprise line and a consumer/home line. (The current moniker for the corporate edition is Symantec Ghost Solution Suite.) Beyond what is listed in the HOWTO for Ghost 12, the corporate edition also includes the ability to individually set the new partition sizes. I'm not sure if this is a corporate-only feature or a more advanced option not discussed in that basic HOWTO. If individually specifying the partition sizes is only thing you would miss from the corporate edition, though, I'd just let Ghost 12 do it's thing and then tweak the paritition sizes using the Open Source Parted Magic as noted earlier.

Hope this helps.


Matthew

 

HI Mathew,
Yes it does. Thank you. Next time I'll know better.

BTW, since I did not know the default behavior of the copy operation, I did not realize the whole disk would not be taken care of. An easy mistake to make, I think.

Ghost consumer edition does not have the ability to create partitions as far as I know. But, Partition Magic can take care of that job. Oh, Partition Magic is now owned by Symantec. It probably adds the partitioning capability to the Ghost Suite.

Thanks Again, Sparky

 

Hello all and thanks for all the wonderfull information. Being a noobie I have a question. I have a CF 29HTm50bm I am trying to clone existing 40GB hard drive using Acronis True Image 11 to a WD3200BEVE. I have tried multiple times and all I can get is a black screen with the blinking white cursor top left hand corner. I have read multiple posts and can't seem to kick this one. I have used the usb sled method with the bootable TI disk on the CF 29 and I have tried the using multiple sleds on another computer but to no avail. What am I missing. Thanks in advance. Jason

 

I know for a FACT that if you are using Symantec Ghost 11.0 then you HAVE to go to options and select the "image boot" option so that you won't get this blinking cursor... I don't work with acronis much but I know that this is the case in Ghost. Your other option is to clone it over the network to a server and then from the server back to the 320GB WD drive witch will will work NO PROBLEM. Hope that helps

 

Thanks JB I know there has to be an option like this for TI 11 but I can't find it my other option is to do clean install. This was a off lease toughbook it came with a copy of XP pro for refurbished pc's and a disk that says asset Verification and analyses CD ver 2.3 is this specific drivers that I would need for a clean install.
thanks Jason

 

Sparky,
I usually partition the new drive from disk manager, create the logical drive in extended partition and format. Primary partition is made "active" and unformatted, not necessary as Ghost will take care of that.

With Ghost, I'd select "disk to partition" (primary partition as destination) and upon cloning completion, exit Ghost (not "reset computer") and shut down. [for some odd reason, if I reset, the new cloned drive will boot up to the XP splash screen and stop]

Swap HDDs and you're good to go... most of the time!

 

I usually just shut the computer off via the switch on the power supply lol... But I didn't think it mattered... Maybe it does.

Also to this day I CANNOT clone IBM T40 series or T60 series... No matter WHAT I DO with Ghost 11 I CAN'T do it... I think it's a combination of the fact that I'm to lazy to get better software and that I don't have to clone these enough to make it worth my time to figure out why I can't do this. Both of which work FINE over the network which is how I prefer to clone my stuff anyways...

 

Well I feel like a big DA! I figured it out. I switched to a different usb sled I was using the Sabrent that has a full size usb splitter type cord. The one I went to is a Nix and it takes a mini usb cord. Just run TI 11 for the 10th or 11th time and getting real good at the HD caddy by the way. Thanks for all the great threads .
Jason

 

I'm surprised that you didn't expect the partition on the new disk to be the same size as the one on the old disk.

It is a "clone" of the original partition.

But good to hear that you finally got what you wanted.

 

Clonezilla to the rescue

1. attach your new drive via USB enclosure
2. boot from the Clonezilla CD or USB stick
3. migrate your data using the menu
4. resize the partition as required

Should take you about an hour or so...

 

Can't be. Ghost automatically re-size the source partition/disk to the destination partition/disk.

So long as the "used space" in the source is not larger than the destination partition/disk, it will clone over and it doesn't matter if the destination HDD is smaller in capacity.

Some software will only do larger than source cloning.

 

You could use imagex from the Microsoft WAIK.

Build a Windows PE CD or copy imagex from the installed location to a LIVE CD

Boot this live CD on your machine.

and type something like :

imagex /capture c:\ d:\imaging\data.wim "Image of Harddisk" /verify

Where c: is the drive you are capturing from and d: is your destination.

and to apply the image type

imagex /apply d:\imaging\data.wim 1 C:\ /verify

You can even mount the image to a folder.