Cloning software? Issues with CF-T7

What software recommendations do you guys have for cloning drives? NOTHING I have tried will get me a bootable clone. I ran out of space on my CF-T7 100gb drive and need to move up to a 320gb.

I have tried EASEUS Partition Master 9.1.0 Professional Edition, Norton Ghost 14, g-parted, and a couple others.

I think PM14 might work from the recovery environment (no recovery disk media?), or copying a the drive out of the system. Back in the day, I used Ghost to much success. I am missing something here now though. Although I am also pretty sure I was using floppy recovery disks too....

I was able to make copies with Easeus, but they won't boot. And no tricks I throw seem to fix that. My thought would be copy it, let it be broken, fix by booting the "windows recovery install DVD." Problem is every Vista .iso I have, just wants to reinstall Vista. Not getting the option to repair.

What am I missing guys? I didn't have any issues cloning my CF-19 back and forth. It was so uneventful, I don't really remember the exact steps I took.

Humm... Okay bigger 320gb drive has clone of the CF-19 at the end and 250gb or more in front of unallocated space. With a 100gb primary going into the front of that empty 250gb spot, I cloned then filled the rest of the space. Maybe that was what broke it...

Starting to worry about the clone/backup I made of my CF-19.

 

Serveral times I got success with the following combination:

For cloning drives (and they do boot after cloning ):
The freeware Clonezilla as Live-CD or Live-USB
Clonezilla - About
Clonezilla - Downloads

After cloning the drive you could resize the Partition (if you do clone from a small to a bigger HDD) with the freeware PartEd which is also available as Live-CD from
GParted -- Live CD/USB/PXE/HD
GParted - Downloads

With clonezilla you could also clone from the internal HDD to a external USB-HDD.

I will use this combination myself these days again to clone the 60GB IDE of my CF-29 to a 320GB SATA (using SATA later with a ** SATA ** Hard Drive CADDY Panasonic Toughbook CF-29 laptop + HEATER CABLE eBay No 380601833930 from techtuff). The 320GB will be cloned with a USB-Adapter and then I will put it in the new caddy with the special IDE to SATA Adapter.

 

Gparted was one of the ones I tried using inside a Linux environment. Whatever feature set/version I had available, didn't seem to have enough options. But you only mention that for resizing afterwards....

This morning poking some more at the EASEUS program, I found an option under the "wizards" menue to clone the drive and upgrade. It is supposed to be able to fill the unallocated drive space, but that part didn't seem to work. No big deal. I can do that afterwards.

First attempt was a GLORIOUS failure. I had the drive just connected to the cable, and the bottom of the laptop disassembled for quick access. It was 89% done. My CF-19 complained it needed power. I figured the CF-T7 battery was charged up enough to last the rest of the process, so I unplugged the cable. -=BLIP=- Ooops... I forgot I had removed the battery...

 

Try Acronis Truimage Home with the plus pak. The pluspak is installed separately. It will make a bootable DVD.

 

Thanks guys, I will have to give both of those a a try!

EASEUS Partition Master 9.1.0 Professional Edition was the winner today. I am actually on the CF-T7 with the cloned 320gb drive right now. :hi2:

The trick was that "clone disk wizard" I had missed in all the other attempts. :thumbsup:

Issues? Well it wiped the whole 320gb drive to do the clone. Not a big deal I guess. The end of the drive had a clone of my CF-19, that was made earlier and so I am sure would have issues anyways. Now oddly I had used this same program cloning drives back and forth with the WRONG procedures several times the past few weeks. Seems the only issue I had was needing to use the windows install cd (usb load) to repair windows. Maybe that was because of XP and W7, this here is a Vista system. For now...

It took over 5hrs to clone 117gb of data! TWICE...

It didn't resize the drive to fill all unallocated space like the interface claimed it could. I restarted the process twice in the beginning trying to figure out why. Oh well. I will just do it separately.

It went halfway through the startup process, and -=BLIP=- shutdown. Made me a bit nervous. It booted back up and restarted again to install new HDD drivers. Not sure if the shutdown blip was normal, but the next restart after drivers install, went fine.

So I am back operational!

I REALLY need to get another power adapter....

And for my next trick, time to resize the HDD. No point in this exercise otherwise. After that, I am going to go about upgrading this to W7. Although not before I verify the old HDD still boots up normally in this...

 

Verified! Still boots fine on the old HDD like I thought it would. Okay time for the upgrades and to put it back together!

 

Its done
My CF-29 is now using a WD3200BUCT 320GB SATA Drive on his IDE-Controller.
Cloning the HDD was no problem with Clonezilla and GParted Live-CDs.

If you could read german there a text at
320GB SATA HDD fuer mein Toughbook CF-29 | Wordpress-Blog von Guido Lehwalder
but if you cnt read german then take a look at the pictures or use Google-Translator

 

Good info there! EASEUS Partition Master worked well for me, once I found that cloning wizard.

 

UPDATE: Okay I found an issue with EASEUS Partition Master... I have a feeling this could be an issue with other cloning software too.

So I scored a nice HP laptop. Except the MB is cooked (video cpu needs to be reballed). But it had bits! Memory upgraded both my Toughbooks and also gave me another 250gb HDD.

Wanted to clone my 320gb drive in the CF-T7, down into the 250gb drive. Even resizing the partition down in the CF-T7 wouldn't let me do this. Couldn't find any combination that would pull this trick off.

In the game of musical HDD swapping, I discovered that putting the clone of the CF-19 running W7 into the CF-T7, works. Mostly.

The nicest/simplest solution right now it to clone my current CF-T7 320gb drive DOWN into the 250gb drive. I have too much data and software installed on it to make a simple data transfer to another drive, worthwhile.

This will require different software though... Instead I think I may just clone the CF-19's current drive up into the 250gb drive, and drop it into the CF-T7. Fix drivers and make sure it is running stable. Transfer any data I need off the 320gb drive to the CF-T7, then clone the CF-19 up into the 320gb drive, for the CF-19.

The 320gb drive is 7200rpm. And it makes a big difference when transferring 10-16gb worth of pictures off a camera card for processing... This is one time where a 7200rpm drive makes a HUGE difference over a 5400rpm one!!!!

 

Acronis has never given me any issues on the source or target drive size. My only small concern is that I am going to use an image of a platter drive on a SSD. I will probably need to find some software to change the SSD on the fly afterwards for the trim and such. Maybe Acronis recognizes the SSD, I dunno yet.

 

Shawn, downloading that now. I really like the whole package there too. Some of the other program features might even be worth paying for.

 

Shawn, I cloned both the CF-30MK3 and the CF-52 onto two Samsung 830s with no problems using Acronis. Both have been happily speeding along since last July. Both are running W7.
CAP
Edit: No trimming, no messing about whatsoever.

 

Thanks Cap...
That's good to hear. I just installed an SSD in my C5 and need to restore from an Acronis image.

 

Hey! CAP, welcome back! Its been a long time since the last one.

ohlip

 

CF-52 CC

I just tried to clone using an OLD copy of drive works image commander - -as windows XP tries to boot I get a "autochk program not found - SKIPPING-AUTOCHECK" .... & blue screen to reboot she goes. over....& OVER -

Merry Christmas!

 

DriveWorks Image Commander won't work on Win XP. Nor will it work on any NTFS partitions.

System Requirements

Platform: Windows NT / 98 / 2000 / Me / 95, Mac, Linux, Unix

Here is a free program to try.
Clonezilla - About

 

I bought Acronis True Image ages ago and it's always worked fine for me. My only complaint is that it's only licensed for one PC, which can be inconvenient.
The software Intel provided with an SSD contained a limited version of Acronis - that seemed like a pretty good recommendation.

 

OK- Thanks so much for the help- I looked at the suggestions & ended up using this off of cnet : "Easeus Todo Backup" I was up & running in short order.....Merry Christmas

 

what about aomei backupper?
I'm using it now