JohnthePilot

Not quite, I was waiting for a reply to my last post.
Did you try what I suggested?

linderman

I submitted an alternate plan which would work well, however you choose to continue the xxclone battle when the software is not working correctly for you.

and by the way; the drive image clone WILL be bootable if the imaged partiton was bootable.

however at this point sooooooo much "stuff" has been tried on your external drive. I would wipe the whole drive with Dariks boot n Nuke eraser then repartition and reformat BEFORE using the image guide

the image process is very easy. Simply install drive image on your now C drive, from within that program make an imagr file of your C drive; you will need to store that image file on a partition on your USB drive, the storage partition will need to be say one gigabyte larger than 1/2 of your now C drive

in other words:

you have a 80 gig OS drive

after using boot & nuke >>>> you will need to partition your USB drive into two chunks, one chunk will be 41gigs the other partition will be the remaining size

after you have done the partitioning; format both chunks with NTFS

then run the image program, store the image file on the smaller 41 gig chunk of the USB drive, then execute the image restore command from within drive image xml, choose the image file you saved @ the samll chunk; tell the program to restore the image file to the big chunk of the USB drive, the program will tell you the target partition is larger than the image file; do you want to use the whole partition size = YES

after this is complete; enter diskmanagement and verify the USB drive partition that just had the image restored to it is set as the active partition>>>>>> this is done by simply right clicking on the partition section of that drive shown in the bottom half of disk management, after right clicking a drop down menu will appear, in that menu will be "set active" >>>>> hit yes
then afterwards swap drives from the machine, remove the old drive, install the USB drive (it wont be USB at that point ????? correct ???

boot the machine

keep us posted


PS aftwards we can remove the 41 gig partition if you desire so, but I think you will find it rather handy ???

adamsplatt

OK, we probably have to let this drop. I got frustrated with the situation and @moved@ My Pictures and My Music over to a partition on the external drive - really to make space on the C - source drive as I could not defrag the almost totally full drive. This corrupted my C Drive and it went unstable - crashing repeatably! So I decided to fit the big external drive into the laptop and start again by installing XP and all my other software. Then I put the smaller (ex C drive ) into the external caddie so have all my docs and other data files accessible. Perhaps not a bad solution really as now have got rid of a lot of slowing up stuff and have a nice new XP set up which I will try not to abuse so heavily as I used to....Now struggling to get Office 2007 on as I have a common problem (apparently) of install stopping halfway and requesing a .cab file which does not appear to be avaialable or accessible. Any clues - I see on the web that this is not an uncommon problem but no one seems to have definitive solution on offer....Thanks for all the late night assistance and sorry it did not work. I could not persuade my partner to let me clone her hard drive as a test for understandable reasons as she has witnessed the tribulations over the past week or two....and not want her system messed up too! adam

JohnthePilot

Hi Adam,
Sorry it didn't work out the way it should. Now that you've cleared everything out and got a clean install, why not try it again just to prove it does work. I can understand your partner's apprehension, but there really is no need.
As far as Office 2007 is concerned, I can't really help. I tried the beta and how have the trial version and they both installed without a hitch. All I can suggest is that you remove the existing version with the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility. If it's not already on your machine you can get it from here. Run the program msicuu.exe. It's in C:\Program Files\Windows Installer Cleanup. Then reinstall 2007.
Once again, sorry we weren't able to solve your original problem.
Regards,
John.

adamsplatt

Thank you very much John, I cannot try to clone again because I have now filled my external Drive has removed from the laptop with a GHOST backup of my new system. I think the problem was from the source drive - overloaded or corrup so I am happy to try again next time I need to. I saw on another XXCLNE support site that someone rebooted from their cloned external USB drive with no problem - they said so long as BIOS permits USB booting the Windows non external boot restriction is irrelevant, which makes sense to me.

Office 2007 and all my other software ok and all my data files brought back in from the external drive (original C Drive). And things faster than before. So really I may have done the right thing given I had a slow and cluttered system etc.

Thanks for patience - I have learened a good bit through the exercise as one does. adam

JohnthePilot

OK Adam and thanks for letting us know. I'll cloase this thread but if ever you get any other problems feel free to open another.
Regards,
John.