750GB Sata drive not Detected by GHOST or Acronis True Image

[Majestic]

Hi,

I have a 750GB Sata drive not Detected by GHOST or Acronis True Image. Long story short, I got a clients failing hard drive which I've backed up the data and I want to see if a clone will be successful so I don't have to reinstall from scratch. In the worst case scenario I at least can use the restore partition.

In any case-- I ran Ghost and Acronis true Image and neither SEE these 2 Seagate 750GB sata drives. This is on an HP Pavilion Elite m9340f desktop. When I boot up I see the raid bios screen (reporting that these are non-raid drives). I had thought I could turn off the raid in the bios but it's too simplified (gotta love HP for dummying down things...). It seems all sata ports are on the raid controller.

Any ideas? Perhaps I could clone it in windows but I'm sure that'd be extremely slow.

What does everybody here use in these situations?

Majestic

 

[Jory]

You could use UBCD4Win. If it's a driver problem you should be able to include it on the disk, and then use DriveImage XML to clone it.

 

[purple_minion]

Hi,

I have a 750GB Sata drive not Detected by GHOST or Acronis True Image. Long story short, I got a clients failing hard drive which I've backed up the data and I want to see if a clone will be successful so I don't have to reinstall from scratch. In the worst case scenario I at least can use the restore partition.

In any case-- I ran Ghost and Acronis true Image and neither SEE these 2 Seagate 750GB sata drives. This is on an HP Pavilion Elite m9340f desktop. When I boot up I see the raid bios screen (reporting that these are non-raid drives). I had thought I could turn off the raid in the bios but it's too simplified (gotta love HP for dummying down things...). It seems all sata ports are on the raid controller.

Any ideas? Perhaps I could clone it in windows but I'm sure that'd be extremely slow.

What does everybody here use in these situations?

Majestic

I may be wrong, but on my motherboard disabling the raid disables the SATA ports. I just leave it enabled, it detects the drives (which you can only software raid in winblows IIRC) and off it goes. If the only thing you changed was the drive I would think you could do True Image from another desktop or via usb perhaps.

 

[NYJimbo]

I recently began cloning IDE drives to SATA on a bunch of machines. It was a nightmare on some desktops as either the program (acronis migrate easy) would not see the drives or the program would abort with some error during detection. Oddly enough we found we could clone ANY drive on some computers but not on some other computers. So we would remove the drives and put them on a known-good box, do the cloning and then move them back to their proper PC.

Is it possible for you to try the cloning process on a few different computers?. I mean move the source and destination drives off to one or more "other" machines ?. It could be a BIOS issue or something in the firmware that these programs are barfing on.

If you have an assortment of PC's try to find one that senses all drives and Acronis/Ghost likes and stick with it as your "drive cloning machine".

Hope some of this can help you.

 

[Majestic]

I recently began cloning IDE drives to SATA on a bunch of machines. It was a nightmare on some desktops as either the program (acronis migrate easy) would not see the drives or the program would abort with some error during detection. Oddly enough we found we could clone ANY drive on some computers but not on some other computers. So we would remove the drives and put them on a known-good box, do the cloning and then move them back to their proper PC.

Is it possible for you to try the cloning process on a few different computers?. I mean move the source and destination drives off to one or more "other" machines ?. It could be a BIOS issue or something in the firmware that these programs are barfing on.

If you have an assortment of PC's try to find one that senses all drives and Acronis/Ghost likes and stick with it as your "drive cloning machine".

Hope some of this can help you.

Yup it definitely was frustrating like crazy.. so I said screw it I can't take it anymore and yes moved it to my main machine.

I used driveimage XML (thanks Jory!) to do the cloning while within windows. Granted I think at that point it MAY have worked off Ghost or TrueImage but I just couldn't sacrifice the whole machine while it cloned at the time.

I actually tried with UBCD but for some reason drivexml wasn't working on it and it was too much of a bitch to recreate it as I did it a couple of times and still didn't have it working. I think I have to check the plugins and see what's going on.

Anyway the cloning stopped at like 68% but it was enough to get most of it done... Now I'm just using vice-versa folder compare to syncronize the files.

Thanks guys!

Majestic

 

[NYJimbo]

Anyway the cloning stopped at like 68% but it was enough to get most of it done... Now I'm just using vice-versa folder compare to syncronize the files.

Interesting technique. Most cloning programs I work with seem to clone by track or structure, not by file. So if it fails at something like 68% you would likely have a corrupted drive that may look good but not really be there if you start running everything. Maybe I am not understanding what you mean here, but I would really recommend doing a full scan of the drive for errors, maybe do a defrag, etc.

 

[Majestic]

Interesting technique. Most cloning programs I work with seem to clone by track or structure, not by file. So if it fails at something like 68% you would likely have a corrupted drive that may look good but not really be there if you start running everything. Maybe I am not understanding what you mean here, but I would really recommend doing a full scan of the drive for errors, maybe do a defrag, etc.

Actually, Vice-Versa is not a cloning program. It's simply a folder compare program which can syncronize folders or drives to make sure they are exactly the same.

The way I figure it if the drive fails on another drive clone attempt it's not worth it.

The drive IS bad... I have a replacement drive for it from HP here and I'm just trying to make a copy of the original. It's got the grinding noise and all that but it does boot (SLOWLY)... DriveXML wasn't as smart as GHOST in terms of being able to ignore CRC errors and continue. So yes, when I Rebooted chkdsk reported and repaired a TON of errors on the destination drive.

Following that I'm using vice-versa which basically matches the CRC on all folders and files on the drives then syncronizes the files. Provided the CRCs are correct I don't think I'll have any issues. I'll know shortly when the program finishes syncronizing and I boot it up or test the files themselves.

Majestic

 

[purple_minion]

There are freebies that do much the same thing, such as Clonezilla, FOG, G4L, as well as ddrescue for those tough cases like you have. While the free ones (which are quality, so not to be confused with free=zero cost=cheap=worthless) don't restore to dissimilar hardware like True Image, they'll take a good backup image like DriveImage XML, or Ghost.

Myself, someday I'd like to get FOG going on a server, since it boots over PXE and you wouldn't even need a cd or usb drive.

 

[bitznpcz]

Acronis True Image

I had a similar problem with Acronis and SATA drives. Try creating a boot CD using Acronis Media Builder and choose the Safe Version rather than the Full Version... has worked for me in the past

 

[Majestic]

I had a similar problem with Acronis and SATA drives. Try creating a boot CD using Acronis Media Builder and choose the Safe Version rather than the Full Version... has worked for me in the past

hmmm... I'll look into that. Never used the media builder before..

Thanks

Majestic

 

[MikeRepairs]

I am not sure if this is related or not.... I was having a problem where Acronis Bart PE live boot disk could not read SATA drives on laptops.
Here is how I fixed it.
I download the Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager - AHCI drivers from Intel.
I unzipped the files and put them in this folder:
C:\pebuilder3110a\drivers\SCSIAdapter\iastor

Then I used pebuilder to make a new ISO image, burned a new CD and now it works. It is still backwards compatible with IDE drives.

Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager (6914KB)
8.8.0.1009 3/13/2009
Supports SATA RAID 5/10 on specific desktop platforms, SATA RAID 0/1, AHCI, and matrix RAID on specific desktop and mobile platforms

P.S. I also have another tip for cloning IDE drives to SATA:
I had an issue with using Acronis True Image to cloning WinXP IDE drives to SATA. The problem was after the clone when I booted WinXP, it would freeze at the logo. The SATA drivers were not initialized therefore the boot freeze. This is how I resolved this: I first installed the SATA drive as a slave and started WinXP, then it says "new hardware found... installing drivers", etc. Now you can install the SATA drive as primary, clone using True image and windows XP will start.

 

[Bobbing]

Sata

Try going into the BIOS and disable AHCI (or RAID which includes AHCI in its functions) and use native SATA IDE emulation mode (SATA/PATA).

 

[Bobbing]

For Ghost

The Symantec Ghost Client can interface with hard disk controllers by accessing the
appropriate memory and hardware locations directly. However, in doing so, this can
bypass the RAID enhancements that are provided by the system BIOS. The system
BIOS understands the underlying disk and RAID array structures and formats. In
order to properly use Ghost to interact with a RAID volume, the user should ensure
that the tool is operating in a mode where it does not talk directly to the hardware
resources, but rather communicates using the system BIOS.

Solution
In order to use Ghost in a RAID volume, the user must:
1. Disable the Ghost Direct Disk Access
2. Force it to rely on Extended INT13 to access the disk

Ghost Version 7.5
To set these options for Ghost Version 7.5, do the following:
1. Start Ghost from the DOS prompt. (Not the Windows Command
2. Prompt session)
3. Select the Options (ALT+O) menu
4. Scroll to the HDD Access tab
5. Select the Use Extended Interrupt 13h disk access (ALT + E)
6. Select the Disable direct IDE access support (ALT + B )
7. Select the Disable direct ASPI/SCSI access support (ALT + B )
8. Press (ALT+A) to activate the Accept button to use the new settings
9. Proceed to run Ghost as normal

Ghost Version 8.0
To set the options for Ghost Version 8.0, do the following:
1. Use the command line option to disable direct disk access and enable INT13
2. In DOS prompt, start Ghost with this command line: ghost.exe -ffx -fni
Note:
ffx - Prefers the use of Extended Interrupt 13h disk access for hard disk
operations.
fni - Disable direct IDE access support for IDE hard disk operations.