Clone HDD's failing often

JohnDoe1980

JohnDoe1980

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Hello all. I do a ton of data migration at my work. Sometimes using Fabs Backup. Sometimes cloning. When cloning I use Aomei Backupper. My success rate on clones is about 50 percent. That's horrible. When I say clone failed what I mean is, the clone says it's successful, I pop the new drive into the computer and usually get either a BSOD or a No Bootable Device. I decided to try Acronis True Image to clone and right now I'm 3 for 3. The only thing different that I see is that when running acronis, it gives a warning that the new drive will be converted to GPT "to make the drive bootable". This is something I don't understand. If I am cloning a hard drive that is in MBR, and the new SSD is GPT, I would use diskpart to convert the new drive to MBR. Same with GPT to GPT. That's what I've been doing when cloning with Aomei. I'm wondering why Acronis would automatically convert the target drive to GPT when the source drive is MBR. I prefer Aomei because the user interface is much more friendly but I'll keep using Acronis for now.
 
We use a hardware drive duplicator...fastest for us, rock solid.
For those unusual cases where we have to downsize, we'll use the current version of Acronis...the free download from the manufacturers website, and it works very well.
We're tried most of the other 3rd party products and a few more some have probably never heard of, and find the above two methods are best, fastest, and most reliable for us.
 
JohnDoe1980 said:
Is that what it's called?
Click to expand...
There are a few different brands, and each brand usually sells a few different models...
We have a few StarTech Drive Duplicators....(they have the nickname Drive Goblin).
www.startech.com

HDD Duplicators - Hard Drive Cloning/Copying | StarTech.com

Our standalone, eSATA, and USB Drive Duplicators provide comprehensive hard drive copying, saving time by providing immediate access to drive contents without having to mount the drive in a computer chassis or install into an enclosure
www.startech.com www.startech.com
We have a couple of the SATDUP11 models...

For NVMEs....we have a couple of duplicators like this Acasis one,

Just a note, AFAIK, hardware drive duplicators will not "downsize". They will clone to identical destination drives or larger.
For any downsizing projects ...we prefer the Acronis from the drive brand. We rarely downsize these days though since drives have gotten so cheap.. takes far less time to use the hardware dupe machine...and time is money.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
There are a few different brands, and each brand usually sells a few different models...
We have a few StarTech Drive Duplicators....(they have the nickname Drive Goblin).
www.startech.com

HDD Duplicators - Hard Drive Cloning/Copying | StarTech.com

Our standalone, eSATA, and USB Drive Duplicators provide comprehensive hard drive copying, saving time by providing immediate access to drive contents without having to mount the drive in a computer chassis or install into an enclosure
www.startech.com www.startech.com
We have a couple of the SATDUP11 models...

For NVMEs....we have a couple of duplicators like this Acasis one,

Just a note, AFAIK, hardware drive duplicators will not "downsize". They will clone to identical destination drives or larger.
For any downsizing projects ...we prefer the Acronis from the drive brand. We rarely downsize these days though since drives have gotten so cheap.. takes far less time to use the hardware dupe machine...and time is money.
Click to expand...
Ohhh, You're talking about toasters.. Yea, we have one here but I never use it as I've had problems with it in the past. One can't watch the progress in a GUI, some drives have mounting brackets on them that are a pain to take off, but can be used with sata cables, and of course the size thing, sometimes we downsize, when a client has a 1tb drive and uses barely any of it, we can throw in a 480GB, or a 512GB to a 480GB which is what we carry. Yea, I've been warned to stay away from toasters. They are nice to simply use as a dock to quickly access a drive. Thanks for the input though.
 
JohnDoe1980 said:
Ohhh, You're talking about toasters.. Yea, we have one here but I never use it as I've had problems with it in the past. One can't watch the progress in a GUI, some drives have mounting brackets on them that are a pain to take off, but can be used with sata cables, and of course the size thing, sometimes we downsize, when a client has a 1tb drive and uses barely any of it, we can throw in a 480GB, or a 512GB to a 480GB which is what we carry. Yea, I've been warned to stay away from toasters. They are nice to simply use as a dock to quickly access a drive. Thanks for the input though.
Click to expand...
Look at the model that I stated we had...not a "toaster"...has cables on each side to connect, easy peasy. Also has an LED display with the progress % going...and an audible beep when done. Well worth the money many times over.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Look at the model that I stated we had...not a "toaster"...has cables on each side to connect, easy peasy. Also has an LED display with the progress % going...and an audible beep when done. Well worth the money many times over.
Click to expand...
Oh, ok. Right now I'm cloning a 500GB HDD to a 256GB M.2 SSD, fingers crossed it works. I get a lot of these jobs.
 
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Computer Bloke said:
?
Click to expand...

I presumed 500GB, since so much talk of downsizing had occurred. The days of HDDs this small are so long gone that I barely remember them. But I just so happen to have a WD Caviar 28400 lying about here that touts a massive 8455.2 MB capacity (with a manufacture date of June 1999).
 
britechguy said:
I presumed 500GB
Click to expand...
My guess too, but when you presume you make a pres out of u and me - I thought it safer to ask.

The underlying question, of course, is "what is OP doing to screw up so many clones?", and either blindly copying from a larger device to a smaller one without resizing or copying from a weird source device* might explain that.

*I was thinking of those cute 1.8" Toshiba drives that you used to find in portable music players. Those could be tricky.
 
So my 4th clone failed today. On boot I got an error about winload.efi

I looked that up and followed the instructions to rebuild the bcd. That didn't help. Now I'm getting "windows failed to start 0xc000000f. I may just have to go with fabs on this because I had planned to have this done by the end of day.
 
JohnDoe1980 said:
So there should be no problem doing this if you're not using a toaster, but actual software like I stated earlier.
Click to expand...

Which directly contradicts what you said in your opening post. You can't have it all ways (as you've tried more than "both" at this point).

Cloning, whether software-based or hardware-based, should very, very rarely fail. Particularly with smart cloning which can avoid copying bad sectors.
 
britechguy said:
Which directly contradicts what you said in your opening post. You can't have it all ways (as you've tried more than "both" at this point).

Cloning, whether software-based or hardware-based, should very, very rarely fail. Particularly with smart cloning which can avoid copying bad sectors.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry, I'm not seeing the contradiction. Did I miss something?
 
JohnDoe1980 said:
So there should be no problem doing this if you're not using a toaster, but actual software like I stated earlier.
Click to expand...
Please tell us in detail exactly what you did to clone the drive that failed today. We're much more interested in what actually happened than what should have happened.

Between us all, the people contributing to this thread have cloned tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of hard drives with a much less than 50% failure rate. You're clearly doing something differently.

We'd like to help you learn to help yourself. That's what Technibble is for.
 
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Computer Bloke said:
Please tell us in detail exactly what you did to clone the drive that failed today. We're much more interested in what actually happened than what should have happened.

Between us all, the people contributing to this thread have cloned tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of hard drives with a much less than 50% failure rate. You're clearly doing something differently.

We'd like to help you learn to help yourself. That's what Technibble is for.
Click to expand...
I appreciate the help for sure. So my first attempt on this drive today, I booted into a winPE environment off usb and opened Acronis True Image. I selected the source drive (500GB HDD), then selected the target drive (256GB Nvme m.2 SSD). It gave me a message about converting to GPT. I went ahead and clicked proceed. About an hour later I got a message about not being able to write something to disk (which happened the last three times as well) and I clicked "ignore all", then the clone completed. Then, with the new drive already being installed, I rebooted the system and got the winload.efi error. By the way, the 3 previous clones with the error about not being able to write something to disk, they worked fine anyways.

Next, I did the exact same thing, except with a regular SSD of 480GB. After the clone and installing into the new system, I got the same winload.efi error on boot. So I think something is going on with the source drive.

I am able to access the original HDD (source drive) through explorer and see the files in it.

Now, on another note, since this has failed twice on me, I decided to go with Fabs Backup. I'm sure you are probably familiar with it. Fabs only copied about 800MB worth of data even though everything in the user folder was selected. This is not the first time this has happened with Fabs. So I had to manually copy over everything from the user folder. I installed a fresh copy of win10 on the new drive on the new PC and restored data from Fabs, but as you know, this doesn't restore everything, like program files and some settings. I would much have preferred a working clone.

Also, a new problem. I installed a copy of windows on the new drive but had also left the second SSD I tried still connected via sata. Windows installation went fine but when I shut down the computer, disconnected the second SSD then booted again, I got "no bootable device. insert proper boot device and reboot" error. I then reconnected the second SSD and booted and got a screen asking me to choose which win10 installation and there were two listed. Volume 6 and volume 3. I picked 6 and it went into windows. I rebooted and picked 3 and got the BSOD as before so I know which one is which. I have seen this problem before and forgot what the fix for it is. I think it has something to do with boot information being stored on both drives. I was going to sell the second drive as a data drive alongside the 256GB Nvme but I'm worried that if I wipe the 480GB SSD (second drive) that I wont be able to boot to the new drive. Is any of this making sense?

So that's where I'm at with all this.
 
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