Cloning Windows XP: Acronis True Image works best

Hi,

Just thought I'd share my experience with cloning Windows XP installations. I have tried 3 utilities:

1) Acronis True Image (commercial, 15-day free trial available)
2) Norton Ghost 2003 (commercial)
3) PartImage (free)

Everything was with bootable, primary, active NTFS partitions. First partition on the drive in every case.

My only success story is with Acronis True image. The outcome in more detail:

1) Acronis True Image

+ All went very smoothly. The restored partition booted like a charm, it's like you've never even changed the HDD.
+ The partition backup and restore process went very quickly. For a 5 GB (old) Windows install on a desktop (internal HDD to internal HDD, both 7200RPM), I was done literally in five minutes. A 35GB Windows install on a laptop took one hour to transfer, from internal HDD to USB external HDD (both 5400 RPM). If I had had a third HDD to save the backup file on, I'm sure it would have sped up the process perhaps by one third. Like this, I had to save it on the external, so the recovery was reading the file from one partition and writing it on another (which is quite slow), all via a USB connection.
+ All this was done without ever rebooting Windows.
-- Can't clone partitions on the fly. There is a cloning option, but it only works for the entire HDD as far as I can tell. I only wanted to clone the system partition.

2) Norton Ghost 2003

-- The recovered Windows doesn't work. It hangs at logon, after entering the password.
+ On the fly cloning available.
-- Have to reboot into DOS for any operation.
-- Quite slow. Took 1 hour on a 20GB Windows installation.

Note I've used an older version of NortonGhost. Perhaps they solved the issues in the meantime.

3) PartImage
-- Doesn't work. Cloned Windows hangs (or automatically logs off) after logon, very similarly to Norton Ghost.
-- New partition reads at the old size, even if it the image was written over a larger partition.
-- Need to have a Linux install to run it (or a LiveCD)
+ Quite fast. A roughly 20-GB install, without compression, is backed up in about 20 minutes, and restored in roughly the same amount of time.
+ It's free...
+ At least they state that NTFS support is experimental... Norton Ghost is advertised as fully supporting NTFS but it doesn't, as seen above.

I'm considering buying Acronis True Image...

Hoping this helps,

E.B.E.

 

personal experience = 2nd Acronis True Image

cheers ...

 

I normally use Acronis True Image for cloning HDDs. About a year back it failed to do the job when I had a dual boot Vista - XP HDD, but I think that was because Acronis were slow to introduce full Vista support. I've had no problems since TI 11 came out.

One word of caution, however, if you back up (ie not cloning) a complete disk image to another HDD then Acronis can be fussy about what you restore that image to. One of my friends had a backed-up image and, when his HDD died, tried to restore onto a new HDD with the same nominal capacity. Acronis refused to cooperate. He subsequently bought Casper for doing the backups. Acronis can also be difficult to persuade to clone from a larger HDD to a smaller one. I think my workaround was to only clone the bootable partitiion and then just copy the other partitions (I always have several).

For most people who just want to do a one-off cloning of an existing HDD to a bigger one then the Acronis True Image trial will do fine. I usually make the bootable CD and use that.

John

 

Thanks for the info.

I guess I've been using GHOST so long I don't really pay attention to any shortcomings. I don't try to clone while in Windows (just like I don't try to run any real memory diags in Windows) so booting to DOS doesn't bother me.

20GB in an hour is pretty slow though if going over USB, that would make sense. I haven't been able to get a working USB 2.0 driver for DOS yet. For an internal drive transfer, that is slow. I can normally restore a 20GB partition image from the same drive to the primary partition in about15 minutes (give or take a few minutes) on my laptop.

I did a transfer from my old 200GB Maxtor to a 500GB Seagate on my desktop and I was able to max out the read speeds on the Maxtor, so roughly 2400MB/min to the Seagate.

 

20GB was via USB and from a 4.2KRPM HDD. That's not my main gripe, the thing is the time was wasted -- the cloned XP does not start.