Cloning fiasco

Hi,

I got my Sony Vaio Z VPCZ1290X couple of days ago.

Did the following:
1- Changed the raid to two 256MB ‘C’ & ‘D’ drive
2- Made recovery DVD

For backup, as per pyr0 advice (thanks again) I decided to go for eSATA

1- Got a OWC Slim ExpressCard to eSATA Adapter
2- 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300 (can you use it in my desktop as well)
3- OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini external enclosure
4- Paragon Hard Disk Manager Pro 2010 for cloning

The cloning of about 68GB took 1:25 minutes with a read of 231 and write of 84

I clone it sector by sector although I couldn’t find an option to disregard empty sectors in Paragon options.

While I was working on something else, the Paragon finished the cloning and booted up with the external hard drive still attached to the eSATA.

Window 7 Ultimate 64 bit made a ‘system reserve’ on the external drive once the ‘C’ drive was booted up.

When I detached the eSATA the Window 7 wouldn’t boot up anymore. The only way it would boot up was with the external hard drive attach to it! I assume because of the ‘system reserve’

I tried to repair it but Window 7 stated that my Window 7 is NOT genuine MS software. That’s interesting because I had bought it from Sony USA.

I tried the Paragon recovery CD to clone the external drive back to the ‘C’ drive. After, another 1.25 minutes it failed to boot up because of hardware change.

Interesting that I was trying to protect myself now I have to use DVD recovery.

I like the Paragon especially ‘Alignment tool’ and ‘Backup Capsule’ it’s like recovery partition.

However, for cloning it is way too slow and dangerous.

Any suggestion?

Now I’m looking at Miray HDClone Pro. Anyone has used it here?
My other choice is Acronis True Image Home 2011 although I prefer not to go that way. I bought the ATI 2010 (doesn’t work well with SSD) and a little more than a month 2011 came out!

Any other choice besides Ghost?

Thanks

 

I do know that SSS and cloning doesn't mix. I tried it on my old z and had all sorts of problems.

 

Hi,
For other users thinking of cloning

I bought the Acronis Home 11 with Plus Pack.

The cloning was about 40 GB (didn’t install all my programs) and it was made in about 11 minutes on eSATA.

So far no issue.

 

Have you checked in the bios that boot priority is set so that the internal drive is before the external drive?

 

Yes I have thanks

In anycase you can't boot with eSATA

 

Yeah you can? :| I've booted from an external drive plugged in via esata where the internal drive had nothing on it yet.

 

That's interesting

I thought it's not possible

Thanks for sharing it

 

On a vaio Z??????

 

yeah, on a vaio z?! im trying to just install win 7 onto an expresscard SSD with no friggin luck. it says "windows can not be installed onto this disk. the computers hardware may not support it. ensure the disks controller is enabled in the bios menu.
the card does work fine in the same laptop running XP, altho i dont know if it would allow it to be bootable in xp, just proves that it is a working ssd.

 

I've had this exact problem before with another machine. Clone from the external drive back to the ssds. When it reboots be sure to unplug the external drive. You should be good to go. This is one of the many reasons it's best to clone to an image file.

Ilikepancakes: expresscard SSS is not bootable in z so windows will not install to it.

 

To my knowledge, the express card slot is not bootable. You can boot via eSATA the same as booting from the internal drive (eSATA, for all practical purposes, is regarded as internal). You can boot externally via USB. I have my optical drive in an enclosure. When I need to boot from it, I do not choose to boot from Optical Drive, but to boot from External Device. Lastly, you can boot from the Optical Bay. But... you cannot boot from the SD Card slot, the memory stick slot, firewire?, or Express Card.

Something has to load the drivers for the express card slot before it can be read.

 

Maybe these will help:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/son...loning-free-software-works-raid0-z11-z12.html

and

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/512180-how-make-full-backup-your-vaio-z.html

There are multiple working solutions in there, from GUI based to command line Linux tools (my preferred solution for perfect 1:1 copies).

 

Do you mean it doesn't work well with RAID (as in the Z)? I've used Acronis True Image 2010 with two different laptops, one with an OCZ SSD and another with an Intel X25. Worked great both times.

 

Yes, RAID drivers is normally the issue.
Many think that just because the backup part works, that restore will work too. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case, because when the backup runs, the drivers for the drives are already loaded, so nothing prevents the backup from going well. During restores, though, you're in a limited boot environment that doesn't have all possible drivers for all possible equipment.

To make it worse, if you run a 64-bit version of Windows, you can't add the drivers you use onto the restore boot CD even if the backup app has facilities for doing so, because the restore environment is going to be either 32-bit (Microsoft doesn't provide a 64-bit PE) or Linux.

All in all, making a backup is only half a backup. You have to test restore too before you know whether or not it will work. An untested backup is often as good as no backup at all.