In the past I used Paragon to make a complete clone by having two identical physical drives and I would clone my C: drive which is dedicated to P3D and all its add ons and I would then have a plug n play bootable exact copy in case of a failure.  Now my C: drive is a Samsung 500Gb SSD and uses about 250Gb of that 500Gb and while I have a new Samsung 500Gb SSD coming I'd like to put an image of my C: drive on it in a partition, and save the other half of the drive for other software.   I will continue to use the 2nd drive's other software partition w/ it's own OS for various things, some games, MS Office, but wish to keep the image of my C:\ on that 2nd drive unaltered so that in the event C: fails I can use the image in one partition in the 2nd drive to copy to a 3rd SSD which would replace the dead SSD.   Is this possible, or when you make a drive 'image' does it have to be on an identical size partition as the drive you are imaging from or no?  Sounds confusing maybe but thanks in advance.

 

#1 SSD:  500gb, one partition, contains all of P3D w/ Win 7

#2 SSD:  500gb, two partitions, one is just the image that can be used to put onto a 3rd SSD should #1 fail, with the second partition for Win 7 and other software.

I use macrium reflect , very good used Paragon before.

I have all my bench OS on a server from XP slim up to win10 and sim OS .

I rebuild it from my workstation Pc have hot swap enabled in bios.

Start Macrium Reflect on the workstation point to the image on the server and rebuild the image to the SSD , if i Done the image on a 120 samsung used 30gb no problem to rebuild to a 60gb Adata.

All OS bootable, take 5min to rebuild a z170 ( Skylake ) win XP64 OS

We use Symantec Ghost for this at work.

We use Acronis True Image in work, and image 1000's of machines a year with it.  Dead easy to use, creates a USB bootable flash drive, and away you go!

I use Acronies, have done for a number of years, very flexible. Regards.

Thanks all, I think I have it now.  I had an unused copy of Paragon and it worked for what I needed to do.  I ended up putting an image of my C: drive w/ OS & P3D onto a partition in a new SSD and used the other half of the SSD for games and internet etc.  Since going to a SATA 3 SSD I've kept OS + P3D + all P3D add ons on the one SSD, so it is very lean and fully dedicated to P3D.  No antivirus or any other form of bloatware required since I don't surf the web or using Office programs on that drive.

Late to the party, but Acronis here too.

Late to the party, but Acronis here too.

 

Hi Martin  :smile:

:smile: late to the party... but nice to speak to you again after all this time.

Not to hijack the thread...

But I've been using Acronis for maybe 3 months (system in signature).  Today I cloned SSD 1 and then shutdown, unplugged SSD 1, left SSD 2 plugged in and rebooted.  Everything booted up fine and other apps / programs seem to work fine but when I tried to start FSX all I get is "Fatal Error...".  I have a number of add-on things installed to a 1 TB HDD.  Do I need to do anything with the BIOS settings in order for the cloned SSD to have identical settings?  I'm at a loss and worried that I've wasted my time and $$ on Acronis and a 2nd SSD (Samsung EVO 500GB).  The whole point was to have a plug n play clone in case something went awry on the 1st SSD.  Anyone have this issue before with Acronis?  BTW, the Acronis had an update that I installed just prior to the clone operation.

Thanks,

Bruce

Not to hijack the thread...

But I've been using Acronis for maybe 3 months (system in signature).  Today I cloned SSD 1 and then shutdown, unplugged SSD 1, left SSD 2 plugged in and rebooted.  Everything booted up fine and other apps / programs seem to work fine but when I tried to start FSX all I get is "Fatal Error...".  I have a number of add-on things installed to a 1 TB HDD.  Do I need to do anything with the BIOS settings in order for the cloned SSD to have identical settings?  I'm at a loss and worried that I've wasted my time and $$ on Acronis and a 2nd SSD (Samsung EVO 500GB).  The whole point was to have a plug n play clone in case something went awry on the 1st SSD.  Anyone have this issue before with Acronis?  BTW, the Acronis had an update that I installed just prior to the clone operation.

Thanks,

Bruce

 

Bruce,

 

I've seen this before myself.  It isn't a fault of Acronis, but Windows itself.

 

It is due to windows being installed to a system with more than 1 hard disk.  Windows sometimes can put the OS on one drive, and the MBR/bootsector info onto the other drive.  I now always disable any extra drives before I install windows, and then plug them back in later.

Not to hijack the thread...

But I've been using Acronis for maybe 3 months (system in signature).  Today I cloned SSD 1 and then shutdown, unplugged SSD 1, left SSD 2 plugged in and rebooted.  Everything booted up fine and other apps / programs seem to work fine but when I tried to start FSX all I get is "Fatal Error...".  I have a number of add-on things installed to a 1 TB HDD.  Do I need to do anything with the BIOS settings in order for the cloned SSD to have identical settings?  I'm at a loss and worried that I've wasted my time and $$ on Acronis and a 2nd SSD (Samsung EVO 500GB).  The whole point was to have a plug n play clone in case something went awry on the 1st SSD.  Anyone have this issue before with Acronis?  BTW, the Acronis had an update that I installed just prior to the clone operation.

Thanks,

Bruce

 

I did this  last week

 

My Primary Flight Sim PC had an 120GB SSD C drive with only the OS... My Flight sim was in other disks. and I was running out space.

 

I need to clone the C: drive to a 250GB SSD (kind of like what you were trying to do).  But instead of cloning I took a complete backup of my c drive including all the MBR and parittions.

 

I then started Acronis with a bootable disk and did a restore of my backed up tib file to the 250GB SSD. I shut down the pc after that..swapped the SSDs and restarted. And Voila... It started. Was able to start the P3D etc.

 

I now have the old 120GB aside.. if I have to swap my SSDs back I think I could.

 

In your case of cloning.,

 

I was told that when you clone the disks.. after you have cloned you should not start up the PC with both the disks on.. it could invalidate one of your c: OS drive. Are you sure you did not do that.

 

BTW..when you reboot with your original c Drive is everything ok? Can you test that your original disk is working fine?

 

If so you you can retry cloning..But this time.. After your update of Acronis build a new bootable cd disk and start up your pc with the bootable new bootable acronis disk and clone from there.. instead of cloning using Windows.

 

2nd ..do what I did ....full back up and restore. again...but please read up the instructions how to to do this... so when you "restore" you are not restoring on the original c: drive rather the second Drive (with the 2nd SSD)

 

Best thing is to go to the Acronis forum and start a new topic for your issue..there are some very helpful people. 

Charlatan/Manny - thanks! I think you're both right, it's a Windows (and operator) error. I did post on the Acronis forums at the same time and did get a very helpful individual that pointed out that Windows 10 is sensitive to which SATA cable the disk is plugged into (Windows disk position) and after unplugging the source SSD I plugged the clone SSD in with a different cable. I'm traveling this week so I won't be able to try again until next week. I'll report back.

 

Manny - I'm not sure I fully understand the process you went through, so if I need to do that I may need some tutoring. I have Windows 10 and FSX on the 500GB SSD so when I go to make the clone obviously both SSDs have to be plugged in. After I clone I unplugged the source SSD as above. When I went back to the original source SSD it works fine.