Hard drive clone didn't clone correctly.

[rjisinspired]

If anyone may know what could cause a copy process to not copy correctly that would be great. I hope I describe the situation accurately.

Yesterday I used Paragon partition manager to clone a friend's hard disk through the "copy disk" wizard. The process started off ok but then I noticed that the progress bar, when doing the task, reset and then stated 16 minutes for the whole operation. When I rebooted the computer, no secondary disk could be found.

I had partitioned the second drive as one primary partition, gave it a drive letter designation and had formatted before the copy process. I have done this procedure a few times in the past without trouble.

I hope I explain the IDE setup as accurate as I can:

I got to get access the second disk by switching a second IDE ribbon cable that has two connectors on the ribbon which was originally connected to the second IDE slot on the board. There is a much smaller IDE cable connected from the main drive to the board, next to the longer cable. Two separate IDE slots.

What I found odd is why there is a small IDE ribbon cable for just one drive, the main, but my friend's cd writer is connected to a longer ribbon cable with connections for a primary and secondary drive in another slot on the board? Some thing is telling me that the longer IDE cable should be in the first-facing slot to where the main drive is situation and the much shorter cable should be replaced with a second longer IDE cable for the second open slot on the board for the cd drive.

By looking at the contents of the disk, the copy either didn't complete or the copy didn't begin. There were folders on the new copy drive but nothing relating to windows folders for names. His main disk normally has a few other parts on it for a reserve, possibly restore?, and one partition that is labeled "unformatted" which I don't understand since I have never come across anything like this where a partition is seen as not formatted.

There are two user accounts on this computer which would explain the extra logical partition. Paragon should be able to copy both accounts since it is a drive copy procedure.

The OS my friend has is XP Pro. Computer is a dell dimension 2400 and it is about 6 years old.

My friend is an old friend and always looks to me when he has a question on something. Actually everyone I know is always asking me questions, lol. I really felt under pressure yesterday but I have done this copying process before and it just seems that when something doesn't go right it can lead to other mishaps. One of them forgetting to toggle back his secondary connection for the CD drive after resetting the cables back. Why do I feel I will be losing an old friend from all of this?

What I'm saying is I have the idea of what I'm doing through my own experiences but there are times when I am not confident when it comes to other people's computers and once in a while things don't go as planned. I am hard on myself since I don't want to come off as incompetent when in fact I know pretty much of what I'm doing. In this case I have cloned drives before and if I am not sure of something I won't start a process until I find out what may be not understood or wrong but when these little mishaps occur, one is stuck and people want answers.

My other theory is maybe I should had used the "sector-by-sector" copy or to use the longer cable with the two IDE connectors in the main slot on the board when doing the copy. With the latter, I don't see that it would matter since data from the first drive would still go to the second drive.

The computer was left alone during the clone. I don't believe anything could had stopped the process and Paragon seems to be in good working order.

[DigeratiPrime]

First: too much information.

Second : I am not familiar with Paragon but I'll try to help.

I think what would help explain the situation most is a screenshot of Paragon so we can see both disk structures. Or just give us as much information on the two disks as possible such as total size, partition sizes, partition types, filesystems, free space on partitions, etc.

Cloning a disk is usually a block based copying, meaning it will preserve the partition type, filesystem, and layout.

Whereas Copying files from one disk to another ignores that information. Generally copying files is safer, cloning is useful if you are trying to copy partitions.

The only reason to share an IDE cable for two devices is if you do not have enough cables or ports on the motherboard. Sharing the cable reduces performance in transfers between devices since they need to take turns talking to the controller, and also can raise issues with jumper settings.

[rjisinspired]

Thanks for responding. I'm just a little nervous about the whole thing so I apologize for putting too much into the post.

I will be cloning from one drive to another.

The old drive is an 80GB western digital and the new one to be copied to is a 160GB western digital. The file system will be NTFS but there FAT partitions also on it for probably the restore portion. The computer I'm working at to do the cloning is at friend's house and I didn't think to make any screen caps but I will the next time I go back.

Paragon keeps the free space intact.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is a diagram showing the IDE configuration on my friend's board. Please excuse the primitive nature of this drawing:

http://rjschat.dyndns.org:8080/paranoha/apps/diagram.jpg

Also is it necessary to swap out the longer IDE cable from slot 2 to slot 1 to do the clone process?

Edited March 30, 2009 by rjisinspired

[Ponch]

No offense but from what you (poorly) explain, you have very little knowledge of IDE setups, cables, master/slave, jumpers settings, formatting, partitions or drives cloning. Unless you really make an effort with your language, there is little we can do without risking copying the drives the wrong way. It just seems miraculous to me that you've done it succesfully before. Reassure us on those points.

That setup is pretty common. My first guess is that you've set the 2nd drive as master on the CDROM's IDE cable, making it 2 master devices on one cable, there for "When I rebooted the computer, no secondary disk could be found."

Unless you mean "no drive was seen in Windows".

[rjisinspired]

I have knowledge of the stuff but when I'm under stress my words don't come out correctly because of rushing.

I don't take offense at all.

I was stuck on the way my friend's cables were connected. I haven't seen a computer yet, besides my friend's, with that type of layout and it seemed foreign to me that's all.

I connected my friend's drive to my computer as slave and was able to view contents of the disk and all of the folders and files appear to be intact as they are on my friend's computer. Why the drive won't boot on his computer is something I'm working on.

Some time ago one of his friends installed XP pro on top of the already OEM XP files on the Dell. I'm not sure if the above action is a factor.

I'll figure it out.