Clonezilla does not work with Windows 8.1 in cloning disk(disk-to-disk clone)

I downloaded the latest version of Clonezilla, in an attempt to do a disk-to-disk clone (I am upgrading from a smaller HDD to a larger HDD). Windows 8.1 OS, NTFS, SATA drives (6 GBps)

I followed all the instructions online on how to do this. For example here is one site (there are also Youtube videos that I watched): http://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-..._to_disk_clone

Clonezilla failed to do a clone, giving an error. I tried it twice, booting from a CD-ROM, and both times it failed.

Upon reboot I had to reformat the D: drive using Windows Disk Manager because Clonezilla did something to it to make it disappear.

I then used Acronis True Image 2014, which did work to do a disk-to-disk clone from old to new drive.

BTW, in the past I have used Clonezilla to take a backup image of a Windows 8.1 OS HD, no problem. But the disk-to-disk clone feature failed.

Question to anybody reading this: after I clone the C: drive into the D: drive, both being SATA, I assume that I can, after the system is stable with the new C: drive (old D: drive), plug in the old "C" drive (which will now be the D: drive), and Windows will recognize it (maybe I'll have to fiddle with the BIOS, but there should be no problem)? Then I can reformat the old C: drive and use it like a D: drive? I don't see why not.

RayLopez99 wrote:
I downloaded the latest version of Clonezilla, in an attempt to do a disk-to-disk clone (I am upgrading from a smaller HDD to a larger HDD). Windows 8.1 OS, NTFS, SATA drives (6 GBps)

I followed all the instructions online on how to do this. For example here is one site (there are also Youtube videos that I watched): http://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-..._to_disk_clone

Clonezilla failed to do a clone, giving an error. I tried it twice, booting from a CD-ROM, and both times it failed.

Upon reboot I had to reformat the D: drive using Windows Disk Manager because Clonezilla did something to it to make it disappear.

I then used Acronis True Image 2014, which did work to do a disk-to-disk clone from old to new drive.

BTW, in the past I have used Clonezilla to take a backup image of a Windows 8.1 OS HD, no problem. But the disk-to-disk clone feature failed.

Question to anybody reading this: after I clone the C: drive into the D: drive, both being SATA, I assume that I can, after the system is stable with the new C: drive (old D: drive), plug in the old "C" drive (which will now be the D: drive), and Windows will recognize it (maybe I'll have to fiddle with the BIOS, but there should be no problem)? Then I can reformat the old C: drive and use it like a D: drive? I don't see why not.


When you clone a drive. boot the destination disk at least once,
by itself.

disk1 -- disk2
disconnect disk1, boot disk2
shutdown
reconnect disk1, do whatever you want (boot either disk1 or disk2)
format disk1 if you want

If you don't do that, the clone disk when booted, sees the pagefile
on the original disk, and becomes confused about where C: is located.
If the clone boots by itself, it discovers only facilities located
on its own disk.

The only time this sort of thing fails, is if you don't really understand
where the "boot" and "system" partitions are located. Look in Disk Management
before cloning, to understand whether everything you need, is actually
on disk1 in the first place. There should be a "boot" and a "system".
Some people have multiple disks, stuff is all over the place, the
setup is very confused (they have C: but use D:\Program Files). If
you're going to do stuff like that, you'd better be a rocket
scientist. And know all the gotchas.

HTH,
Paul

RayLopez99 wrote:

I might at some point switch from a HDD to an SSD, since I do
a lot of compiling of code that takes forever sometimes, but I've
read SSD's are 'only' about twice as fast in terms of average
speed than HDDs (sequential is another matter). 2x is better
than 33% to be sure, but it's not 10x as you might think listening
to people talk about how fast their SSD drives are.

RL

Maybe some day, they'll remove the throttle in the file system.

As near as I can determine, by using a RAM Disk, there seems
to be a command rate limit or an event limit, when working on
disks. The RAM Disk should be very fast, and it's not. There's
a bottleneck in there somewhere.

The OS has various schemes for "fairness", and they must have
some implementation cost. For example, hardware interrupts
might be capped at the 10,000 to 20,000 per second region.
But I can't turn up a CPU clock high enough, to determine
if this limit ever changes (scales) with CPU clock or not.

If I load the 60,000+ files from the Firefox source tarball,
it takes forever to do a search on them. With the RAM Disk,
it only seems to handle hundreds of files per second. Instead
of thousands.

Another data point, my current system with DDR2-800 RAM,
using a RAMDisk gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth. I have a new
computer with DDR3-2400 RAM, and the same RAMDisk software
gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth (the new system has absolutely
HUGE ram bandwidth and has four channels). That should tell you
something. "Where's my scaling ?" There isn't any. Sad.
Needs to be adjusted.

That's why, I like the concept of the SSD, but I don't
like how the OS handles disks in general. It seems the
OS is stuck in 1990 or so.

Keep your eyes open.

Paul

What RAMdisk? What configuration/parameters/etc for the RAMdisk?
(Sometimes (20+ years ago) there is a software issue such that
RAMdisks [and even "null" devices] use a smaller blocksize
than real devices, so a single thread/system piece of software
is CPU limited.)

Can you run more than one RAMdisk at a time? If so, what
happens to the performance? (If possible, install 2 or more
copies of the software with different names and see if that helps.)

Have you tried running a virtual disk
("virtual disk" suggestions: TrueCrypt or VMware)
with the underlying storage on the a RAMdisk?
(Doing so will increase system overhead and remove
some of the protections for software and hardware failure,
but might make finding the bottleneck easier.)

What hardware on both systems?

What operating system on both systems?

Have you looked at the per thread CPU use, interrupt use, etc?
(Maybe something is single threaded and can only use one CPU.
I had problems 20 or more years ago when the I/O interrupt overhead
was high enough to saturate a CPU. This was on US$400K servers
with 16 separate CPUs)

Are you monitoring things to see if any counts seem too high?
(I use Iarsn's TaskInfo program.)


On Mon, 27 Oct 2014 23:15:03 -0400, Paul wrote:

RayLopez99 wrote:

I might at some point switch from a HDD to an SSD, since I do
a lot of compiling of code that takes forever sometimes, but I've
read SSD's are 'only' about twice as fast in terms of average
speed than HDDs (sequential is another matter). 2x is better
than 33% to be sure, but it's not 10x as you might think listening
to people talk about how fast their SSD drives are.

RL

Maybe some day, they'll remove the throttle in the file system.

As near as I can determine, by using a RAM Disk, there seems
to be a command rate limit or an event limit, when working on
disks. The RAM Disk should be very fast, and it's not. There's
a bottleneck in there somewhere.

The OS has various schemes for "fairness", and they must have
some implementation cost. For example, hardware interrupts
might be capped at the 10,000 to 20,000 per second region.
But I can't turn up a CPU clock high enough, to determine
if this limit ever changes (scales) with CPU clock or not.

If I load the 60,000+ files from the Firefox source tarball,
it takes forever to do a search on them. With the RAM Disk,
it only seems to handle hundreds of files per second. Instead
of thousands.

Another data point, my current system with DDR2-800 RAM,
using a RAMDisk gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth. I have a new
computer with DDR3-2400 RAM, and the same RAMDisk software
gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth (the new system has absolutely
HUGE ram bandwidth and has four channels). That should tell you
something. "Where's my scaling ?" There isn't any. Sad.
Needs to be adjusted.

That's why, I like the concept of the SSD, but I don't
like how the OS handles disks in general. It seems the
OS is stuck in 1990 or so.

Keep your eyes open.

Paul

Mark F wrote:
What RAMdisk?

RAMDISK Lite
(up to 4GB, may be allocated from PAE or AWE space.
Buy a copy if you have a really large RAM machine,
as it will handle as much as 64GB)

http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...ftware/ramdisk

That's one of the first really large software RAMDisks that
works worth a damn. I've used other RAMDisks which were based
on the Microsoft sample code of years ago. But those had
relatively low size limits. I used to use those, when doing
file transfer tests and wanting to eliminate a hard drive
as a transfer limitation.

I have WinXP x32 8GB, with 4GB for OS, 4GB (PAE space) for RAMDisk.
WinXP x32 *can* access more than 4GB, but it's only allowed to
do so from Ring0, as a driver. And the RAMDisk runs at driver
level, in order to do that.

You can even stick the pagefile on the 4GB RAMDisk, as a
means of extending the total RAM that WinXP can effectively
use. But I don't recommend that. In a couple of days testing,
I could see the odd glitch, so I no longer have it
configured that way. Now, the RAMDisk is purely discretionary,
can be turned on or off at any time. And is formatted FAT32,
since the entire disk cannot be more than 4GB. This is plenty
for quick unzipping of files, attempts to search, and so on.

And when you run that RAMDisk on a faster machine, it doesn't
scale up like it should.

HDTune does block level access to the disks it tests. I haven't
bothered to test what block size it uses, but it's supposed to
be a large block size. It doesn't matter what file system is
on the hard drive you're testing, since it does no file
system access, and instead works at the block level (on
something like \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 - a block
device kind of reference).

Paul

On 2014-10-28, Paul wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:

I might at some point switch from a HDD to an SSD, since I do
a lot of compiling of code that takes forever sometimes, but I've
read SSD's are 'only' about twice as fast in terms of average
speed than HDDs (sequential is another matter). 2x is better
than 33% to be sure, but it's not 10x as you might think listening
to people talk about how fast their SSD drives are.

RL

Maybe some day, they'll remove the throttle in the file system.

As near as I can determine, by using a RAM Disk, there seems
to be a command rate limit or an event limit, when working on
disks. The RAM Disk should be very fast, and it's not. There's
a bottleneck in there somewhere.

The OS has various schemes for "fairness", and they must have
some implementation cost. For example, hardware interrupts
might be capped at the 10,000 to 20,000 per second region.
But I can't turn up a CPU clock high enough, to determine
if this limit ever changes (scales) with CPU clock or not.

If I load the 60,000+ files from the Firefox source tarball,
it takes forever to do a search on them. With the RAM Disk,
it only seems to handle hundreds of files per second. Instead
of thousands.

Another data point, my current system with DDR2-800 RAM,
using a RAMDisk gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth. I have a new
computer with DDR3-2400 RAM, and the same RAMDisk software
gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth (the new system has absolutely
HUGE ram bandwidth and has four channels). That should tell you
something. "Where's my scaling ?" There isn't any. Sad.
Needs to be adjusted.

That's why, I like the concept of the SSD, but I don't
like how the OS handles disks in general. It seems the
OS is stuck in 1990 or so.

Keep your eyes open.

Paul

Isn't the "security" apps doing some slowdown of any access to a
SSD as well as a HDD? I had problems with m$'s security stuff that
impacted any access to any directory that I do for the 1st time in
a computer session; note that I do shutdown the computer when
not in use, "just because".

Even running m$'s software like "autoruns" appear to elicit a
security check before the program runs; often just doing a right
click to get the context menu so I can select something like
a graphics viewer (irfanview), there is a slowdown before the menu
appears. Since one of the win7's security updates, there is an
intrusion into just about everything.

Now, with win8.1, some security intrusion is there even if it
is much less; perhaps the win7 security slowdown is a way for
msft to "force" people to go with win8?

I don't have any 3rd party security/anti-anything installed.

lew wrote:
On 2014-10-28, Paul wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:

I might at some point switch from a HDD to an SSD, since I do
a lot of compiling of code that takes forever sometimes, but I've
read SSD's are 'only' about twice as fast in terms of average
speed than HDDs (sequential is another matter). 2x is better
than 33% to be sure, but it's not 10x as you might think listening
to people talk about how fast their SSD drives are.

RL
Maybe some day, they'll remove the throttle in the file system.

As near as I can determine, by using a RAM Disk, there seems
to be a command rate limit or an event limit, when working on
disks. The RAM Disk should be very fast, and it's not. There's
a bottleneck in there somewhere.

The OS has various schemes for "fairness", and they must have
some implementation cost. For example, hardware interrupts
might be capped at the 10,000 to 20,000 per second region.
But I can't turn up a CPU clock high enough, to determine
if this limit ever changes (scales) with CPU clock or not.

If I load the 60,000+ files from the Firefox source tarball,
it takes forever to do a search on them. With the RAM Disk,
it only seems to handle hundreds of files per second. Instead
of thousands.

Another data point, my current system with DDR2-800 RAM,
using a RAMDisk gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth. I have a new
computer with DDR3-2400 RAM, and the same RAMDisk software
gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth (the new system has absolutely
HUGE ram bandwidth and has four channels). That should tell you
something. "Where's my scaling ?" There isn't any. Sad.
Needs to be adjusted.

That's why, I like the concept of the SSD, but I don't
like how the OS handles disks in general. It seems the
OS is stuck in 1990 or so.

Keep your eyes open.

Paul

Isn't the "security" apps doing some slowdown of any access to a
SSD as well as a HDD? I had problems with m$'s security stuff that
impacted any access to any directory that I do for the 1st time in
a computer session; note that I do shutdown the computer when
not in use, "just because".

Even running m$'s software like "autoruns" appear to elicit a
security check before the program runs; often just doing a right
click to get the context menu so I can select something like
a graphics viewer (irfanview), there is a slowdown before the menu
appears. Since one of the win7's security updates, there is an
intrusion into just about everything.

Now, with win8.1, some security intrusion is there even if it
is much less; perhaps the win7 security slowdown is a way for
msft to "force" people to go with win8?

I don't have any 3rd party security/anti-anything installed.

Let's ignore the file system results for a moment and
just consider the HDTune results. HDTune works at the
block level. Once you open a handle to the device and
the security test passes, all subsequent operations
are like "reading a file you just opened". There are
no more security gates. And on the two machines, one
with more RAM bandwidth, there was no additional
performance. Something limited the performance,
and it wasn't hardware. And it wasn't security either.
Not on a block level test.

The FAT32 used in the file search test, isn't a particular
security demon. It's pretty open. Not nearly as nasty
as NTFS. And the thing is, if there *wasn't* a throttle,
even security calls could be resolved in a blink of
an eye. It's a RAM Disk, with zero seek time and
4GB/sec bandwidth. Even if you checked the security attributes
of all 60,000 files at 10 microseconds a piece, that doesn't
account for the minutes of search time. There's just no excuse
for going that slow. With a 4GB disk and a 4GB/sec bandwidth,
the entire disk should be readable in 1 second. Even
allowing for the file search code topping out at
300MB/sec or so (the kind of speeds I get when I write
C code here), the search for strings of text should
complete in ~13 seconds. It takes a *lot* longer than that.
Some other limitation is present. I'm surprised SSD
users aren't more disappointed. Your SSD drive has
close to zero seek time, and at 300-500MB/sec bandwidth,
it should absolutely scream, rather than "feel 2x faster".
I feel we're not getting everything we could from
the hardware. Just a gut feel (using my calibrated eyeball).

Paul

On Mon, 27 Oct 2014 17:21:21 -0700 (PDT), RayLopez99
wrote:

I
might at some point switch from a HDD to an SSD, since I do a lot of
compiling of code that takes forever sometimes, but I've read SSD's
are 'only' about twice as fast in terms of average speed than HDDs
(sequential is another matter). 2x is better than 33% to be sure, but
it's not 10x as you might think listening to people talk about how
fast their SSD drives are.

--
My first was a Samsung SSD 64G for $40US on the Christmas sales.
Couple years ago. I put that one across the room, just for
entertainment booting purposes;- two other plattered containing its
multimedia (audio/video).

It's like a transistor radio now, sort of instantaneously. Turn it
on, do it to it, and turn it off. Go back and repeat sequence
endlessly. No delays (past the BIOS POST) or then little if anything
to shutting it down again.

Then I added a couple more SSDs to this one - just the opposite: two
(newer and larger units) between a single plattered drive. Quite a
lot of ways to "play it" between the two SSDs containing 3 active
partitions and 3 operating systems and a boot arbitrator on one of the
drives (discounting, formally, *NIX GRUB packaged by MS for Win7 on
the other SSD my BIOS is set *not* first to boot from).

Really. Too many to offhand list.

Raw SSD transfer rates are likely primary, but the list nevertheless
goes on to encompass quite a few advantages normal daily usage will
reveal to different individual expectations. If I were you I'd pick
up a 128G model just for a taste, to "wet your beak," as the Godfather
might say. They're averaging $50-60 presently. Samsung, again, is
the premier bulk provider for sales in terms of popularity;- as are
two of mine, so I won't contest that. (Wasn't quite as "enamored"
about initially laying in a boot arbitrator and establishing a valid
active partition boot with a Crucial SSd model I've also bought, even
though Crucial is fairly well regarded.)

I never got into Samsung's premier models, btw, with different NAND
chemical approach to substratums. Faster, longevity stuff, and all of
that. Of course, they cost more, too. Be more, closer along what
you're proposing between mechanically plattered and solidstate memory
drives, closer and more to a narrower sense as to be
indistinguishable.

Flasherly wrote:
On Mon, 27 Oct 2014 17:21:21 -0700 (PDT), RayLopez99
wrote:

I
might at some point switch from a HDD to an SSD, since I do a lot of
compiling of code that takes forever sometimes, but I've read SSD's
are 'only' about twice as fast in terms of average speed than HDDs
(sequential is another matter). 2x is better than 33% to be sure, but
it's not 10x as you might think listening to people talk about how
fast their SSD drives are.
If you don't use your computer much, then HDD makes sense.
Quick processing makes a computer
more pleasant to use, for me. If you are still using a dial-up modem,
then ignore this.



--
My first was a Samsung SSD 64G for $40US on the Christmas sales.
Couple years ago. I put that one across the room, just for
entertainment booting purposes;- two other plattered containing its
multimedia (audio/video).

It's like a transistor radio now, sort of instantaneously. Turn it
on, do it to it, and turn it off. Go back and repeat sequence
endlessly. No delays (past the BIOS POST) or then little if anything
to shutting it down again.

Then I added a couple more SSDs to this one - just the opposite: two
(newer and larger units) between a single plattered drive. Quite a
lot of ways to "play it" between the two SSDs containing 3 active
partitions and 3 operating systems and a boot arbitrator on one of the
drives (discounting, formally, *NIX GRUB packaged by MS for Win7 on
the other SSD my BIOS is set *not* first to boot from).

Really. Too many to offhand list.

Raw SSD transfer rates are likely primary, but the list nevertheless
goes on to encompass quite a few advantages normal daily usage will
reveal to different individual expectations. If I were you I'd pick
up a 128G model just for a taste, to "wet your beak," as the Godfather
might say. They're averaging $50-60 presently. Samsung, again, is
the premier bulk provider for sales in terms of popularity;- as are
two of mine, so I won't contest that. (Wasn't quite as "enamored"
about initially laying in a boot arbitrator and establishing a valid
active partition boot with a Crucial SSd model I've also bought, even
though Crucial is fairly well regarded.)

I never got into Samsung's premier models, btw, with different NAND
chemical approach to substratums. Faster, longevity stuff, and all of
that. Of course, they cost more, too. Be more, closer along what
you're proposing between mechanically plattered and solidstate memory
drives, closer and more to a narrower sense as to be
indistinguishable.

On Tue, 28 Oct 2014 14:35:23 -0400, Bill
wrote:

If you don't use your computer much, then HDD makes sense.
Quick processing makes a computer
more pleasant to use, for me. If you are still using a dial-up modem,
then ignore this.

Everything's relative. Relative to massive bulk storage, then you
need a HDD. Relative to speed, SSD. Lots of older laptop users
"feel" they've renewed their laptop's life expectancy by replacing its
HDD with a SSD. (I hate working on them, generally with a slower 2.5
HDD in there, in the first place - god knows what chipset impositions
are on the architecture;- Although, there's benefit to be derived
w/out doubt.)

Also, they've given me (an incentive thingy) 1.4Meg/sec tranx cable
speeds. Sucks, I know, but I'm calling them back to switch back down
to 128K - at 1/10th the 1.4M/s speed. Relativity strikes once more.
It's $44 for me at the lower speed and $60 if stay at high speed. Do
I have a choice -- O, hell no. There's like two competitors serving
my area of millions and millions of people. And they all, relatively
speaking, suck on the Big One. (It's $80 or 90 charged by and for
that competitor's services, btw, at whatever speed increment over
1.4M/s what speed they may offer, which I don't know.)

Try and ignore this, then: I'm very fluent with connecting into
Bahmfuk, Egypt, during a sandstorm, at 33.6baud dial-up connects. But,
does that matter here. . .O, hell no - Verizon, for one, will
literally rub big, fuzzy donkey turds into my face, rather than offer
me that opportunity: They'll charge me $40 monthly, if I elect dial-up
while, at the same time offering basic cable 128K/s $30 monthly.

Relatively, again, we're working in increments of 10-fold. 10-fold
present speed increases for $10-15 more. My dial-up was $4 monthly,
so that's again 10-fold more speed I'll be getting when going off this
"incentive" 1.4M/s thing. Not that it matters. The TELCOs, excuse me
-- private entrepreneurialism among the Big Ones putting up your
hindside (at twice average European domestic subscription rates) --
have passed (local coercion bribery) preventative bylaws, fattening
local political offices with franchise fees taxes, disallowing carrier
competition (ISP) apart their structured rates.

Do I even need such high speeds? Only on occasion, when they're more
of a convenience - a nice touch. You see, I just don't watch
televised programming, have no compulsion, miss how control or popular
acceptance is apportioned, regret or least feel anxiety about not
doing so these days.

I only humbly wish not to give those sons of bitches one goddamned
penny more than feasibly I can, relatively speaking, manage -- without
giving up essential TelePhonic services, modulated by a microphone and
speakers, both here, through an independent ISP-based carrier at a
nominal fee (for a few bucks monthly).