Sunday, November 26, 2006

Cloning is for suckers

Today has been an exercise in frustration. Last night I made a bold proclamation that today I would successfully clone my hard drive. I had put the project on hold since my last post. I picked it up again today. In all fairness though, I probably only spent about six hours on it before giving up.

I’m mildly convinced that there is a giant conspiracy out there who’s sole goal in life (as far as conspiracy’s lives go) is to make damn sure that I have but one small hard drive for my operating system. I have a backup plan. I can always just say screw it, reinstall windows xp pro onto the new drive, and be done with it. Problem with that is, it will take me an entire weekend at least in order to then load all of my current programs back on to the computer, as well as do all the necessary updates and upgrades. Then it will probably be about another week before I am able to get everything back up to speed with those programs as far as tweaking and tinkering is concerned. I like to meddle you see. I rarely go with the defaults of any program, especially when it comes to saving locations. So I’m not really looking forward to doing that.

I’d actually rather spend an entire week trying to figure out how to properly clone the damn thing. It would be worth it in the end because then I’d at least be happy with the knowledge that all the programs are set up properly. I haven’t been able to find much help online. That’s been a little frustrating.

In the highly unlikely event that someone is just cruising the net for problems they want to solve, here’s the deal: I’ve used both Norton Ghost 10.0 and Acronis Easy Migrate to try and clone. Both state that they can clone and resize the old drive to the new drive without problems. I’ve read online that plenty of people have claimed to do this flawlessly. Each time I run the program, it also announces success with the cloning. I unplug the old drive, switch the jumper on the new drive to make it the master, then I reboot. Everything starts to load up. I get the Windows XP splash screen, then I get to the blue screen with the small windows XP logo on it where it would usually give me the option of clicking on a user and entering a password, however, I get no users to choose from, all I get is a tiny little logo on a big blue screen with no responsiveness at all. It’s really pretty frustrating. I’m not sure what I’m missing.

Any help would be much appreciated. But not in a monetary way… think more like a good karma kind of way.

3 comments:

cadiz12 said...

yeah, my computer knowledge pretty much begins and ends with clicking on "restart." sorry. but good luck.

omar said...

Whoa, glad I read that last paragraph. I had a $5,000 check made out to "Jon" ready to go to the mailbox. That would have been embarrassing, if that had gone out and then I realized it's not what you meant.

The only time I've ever had to replace my primary drive, I used an included utility from Western Digital and it luckily worked on the first try. I assume that means the conspirators don't mind if I have a larger drive for my main OS.

Anonymous said...

Its the Microsoft conspiracy. They want to take over your hard drive and too bad for you if you want to upgrade your machine.

This would not be a problem with Linux...