Is it so hard to clone an External 2.5in Drive?

Dear All,

My story goes like this.

I have an older laptop that I had someone (store technician) install a new 500GB HD about a year ago. A couple of months ago the graphics card has basically gone bad. Although it still works, only using the default VGA drivers its painfully slow.

As you may well be aware, graphic cards on laptops are not that simple to replace. Mine is a Dell and I need a specific type, which is quite hard to come across and I am not sure how I will use this spare laptop now, but one thing I do want to make use of is the nice 500GB HD thats inside.

Therefore when I bought this new 500GB HD I also bought an external case to use the old 120GB HD as, well exactly that, an external HD.

So now I want to put back the 120GB and slot the 500GB in my external case and use that as an external.

My problem so far is, before I do this I want to clone the 500GB (only the C drive which is about 95GB) to the old 120GB.

All simple I thought, so I fire up Ghost 15. Process goes through without a problem but when I insert the 120GB drive in, I get a BSOD on boot up.

I had all the options selected as per what I have read and seen on the net, yet twice I have had no luck.

I know the drive is still good as previously I did a clean install of XP on it and inserted the drive in my laptop and it booted up just fine, but cloning does not work.

Does anyone out there know why its not working, or guide me in the right direction. I thought it would have been a simple process and going through google there is not much info that states its a totally different process for cloning a 2.5in external that is contect to the laptop via USB. Do I need a special USB to SATA cable?

Surely there are many people out there who have laptops and would upgrade to a new HD and do this through the method I just explained above.

I am starting to wonder if this is even possible??

Cheers
S

 

Are you using Symantec Ghost? Check what versions of Windows it supports, when I checked the new version, it does not support Windows XP any longer.

Run Error Checking (CHKDSK) on the 120GB drive. You can even go to Disk Management, delete the partition, remake it and format it before running the Ghost image again.

You can try going into the BIOS at startup (the startup configuration settings) and turn off AHCI for the SATA controller.

Did the laptop come with an Operating System installation CD? You might be able to run a Windows repair reinstallation.

Have you tried booting to the Ghost CD? It might have an option to clone the drives directly from one to the other. Another way you might be able to do that is by using the cloning utilities from the HDD manufacturer. Go to the website of the 150GB HDD and get their setup utilities, like Data Lifeguard at WD or DiscWizard at Seagate, they will have a disk-to-disk cloning system. (Hard luck if you spent good $'s on Ghost )

There might be a few other checks/methods. I will move this thread to Hardware (from the Windows XP forum).

Matt

 

Thanks for the reply Matt,

I haven't tried any of the suggestion you mention, but I might run through a few of them.

Norton Ghost 15 works fine on XP. The whole process went through successfully, no hiccups whatsoever.

No option in WD Data Lifeguard to clone with.

I may try making a rescue disc with Ghost 15 and boot of that.

Just the amount of time spent on doing all this I may as well take the surest option and just do a complete re-install, as this will become a bare bone backup laptop to be used in an extreme situation. So i will put back the 120GB drive with bare essentials, and wait till the day I find a replacement card. Its over 4 years old, so it could end up being a dinosaur by that time.

I'm even wondering if its possible to clone a drive this way - externally I mean from a laptop via USB.

 

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc...CZwX2N2PTEuMTIzJnBfcGFnZT0y&p_li=&p_topview=1

 

There is a small problem with Acronis.

You see it picks up my 500GB HD as a whole unit, not as a partition HD, therefore basically it want to clone the whole 500GB (468GB actually) to the destination HD which is only 120GB.

Thats the problem. It won't let me just clone my C Drive which is about 97GB, the main partition.

 

I thought there may be just one partition with 97GB of data on it, the HDD manufacturer's cloning programs only do whole HDDs from one to the other.

Try the boot CD. You can then test having the 500GB in the external case and reading the image from that.

Apart from that, I can only suggest looking up troubleshooting information at the Symantec website or in the User Guide.

Something I might try is putting both drives into a desktop computer and cloning them there.

As I said, after doing the clone, check the partition with CHKDSK. I suppose you are selecting to "Make the drive bootable ", but you don't say what happens when you try to boot to it.

Matt

 

Well I have searched hi and low but still can't find valid info on this to suggest there is a simple process to clone an older smaller HD just incase for say back up purposes. I mean aren't there any people out there cloning a smaller HD just incase the one in the Laptop has problems, they could slip in their backup drive and away you go till the other is fixed or replaced. I would have thought this would have been a common thing. I did it, but the long way, in that I inserted the older 120GB HD and installed a fresh copy of XP on it, with just essential programs, like Anti virus, browser, email and a few others like 7zip etc etc.

I did mention what happens after the clone with Ghost 15 goes through successfully.

All simple I thought, so I fire up Ghost 15. Process goes through without a problem but when I insert the 120GB drive in, I get a BSOD on boot up.

There was a few bad sectors on the 120GB HD long time ago, but the drive works fine, as I said, I did install a fresh copy of Windows XP on it before and it loaded up without a problem.

cheers

 

If the drive has bad sectors it means the data storage medium is peeling off the platter. It will get worse with time (it keeps peeling off). (At least in the past) Ghost needs to have the sectors actually marked as Bad by CHKDSK, but as I said, the sectors are not stable, they continue to grow (the surface peels off).

You need to keep running CHKDSK frequently, something I have done in the past is to is to isolate the damaged portion of the hard disk surface by making that section free-space (UNPARTITIONED. with plenty of leeway).

My damaged HDD came about by a lightning strike and loss of power. I expect the read/write heads of the drive dropped onto the platter. The HDD still goes and it is over ten years old. I don't use it for storing any important files though

If you get bad sectors it will only get worse. It probably means the surface of the platters is starting to peel off.

Matt

 

Your probably correct, but these same bad sector, actually they were labeled as something else, via Hard Disk Sentinel, which i can't remember what the name was, but of memory it wasn't a critical thing, and they never grew, always stayed the same.

I think they were over-written and could not be used or something like that. Other than that the state was showing up as healthy.

 

They get marked as Bad.

The only other things I can suggest is to search for the BSOD identifier at Symantec.

97GB on a 120GB drive does not leave much free-space and it won't be 120GB because of the way they measure them. You will also be losing space depending on how many sectors are marked as bad.

Can you try decreasing the data or programs for the image?

Matt

 

Tried a couple more things which failed and in the end just did a clean re-install.

Didn't want to waste more time on it, then having to remove the drives physically only the find out it doesn't work.

At least this way the system is squeaky clean again.

Not sure why this wasn't working as I definitely had at least 10GB extra on the 120GB HD to play with, so the C Drive partition on the 500GB drive should have fit.

On the surface, cloning looks like a very straight forward and simple process. I found out its not.

Thanks for all you help Matt.

 

Lucky you found out first, not long after starting computing, my Windows drive stopped working, I decided to install my Ghost image but it said the image was corrupt. I fortunately had another image made with a different program and that worked. I don't use Ghost images at home any more, I just back up the data and reinstall fresh (and I think I have only done that once). After several years Windows can get bogged down if you are installing (and uninstalling) many programs, although quality programs don't seem to cause that much problem any more. I avoid installing anything I really don't need, so the system runs "at it's peak "...I hope .

I use Ghost quite a bit at work to build specialised systems. If you have a good image and as we discussed, give it plenty of space, it seems to run like clockwork.

I like to give Windows drive at least 20% free-space to run correctly, defrag won't run under 15% free-space, so that tells me the system is becoming restricted. After running the image, Windows might like to "stretch out" somewhat.

Matt