[Tyler Gibson]

Hi,

I am having trouble with a Dell Optiplex 740 working on HDClone. Whenever I try to make an image from the disk or write an image to the disk HDClone fails at less than midway or runs EXTREMELY SLOW. When copying i'm using an external USB drive and have booted from the CD-ROM version. The data rate for going both directions is typically no more than 5MBps, although I am aware it is slower to write than read. I have tried tweaking some of the settings but none have seemed to work. I have tried this same configuration (CD Boot and same USB Drive) on multiple computers (Different Brands and Models) and all have worked successfully except on any of my Dell Optiplex 740 Model Computers only.

If anyone has any tips or tricks to try they would be wonderfully appreciated.

Thanks

[Alex]

If it is running at 5MB/s, then it's at least running at all. It cannot be that only USB 1 is running, since then the speed would only be 1MB/s. I'm a bit puzzled about the source of this behavior.

As this occurs only on this computer: is the connected USB drive also only in use with this computer, or does it work as expected on other computers?

[Tyler Gibson]

Well i have one piece of infromation I forgot to mention. I tried to run hdclone on the same model (Dell Optiplex 740) again. The speed never even got to 5mbps. It fluctuated a lot and sometimes touched at most 2.5mbps if i got lucky. The internal hard drive indication light does turn off periodically though which seems somewhat puzzling. As for the question about the USB drive it works 100% perfectly on other computers. More info about the usb drive: it has dual USB-outputs (plug-ins) and is a USB 2.0 drive.

[DJ Eatch]

Hi, I'm also getting this issue.
It works fine on the other DELL computers (mainly inspiron laptops) but the Optiplex 740 (AMD processor) seems to have great difficulty.

I am doing a disk to image and the image is to be stored on a 1TB hitachi external USB HDD.

It refuses to boot from USB on most of them, but will boot from the CD.
During the image creation (fast, safe and verified) it finds about 2/3 of the sectors fail validation.

If we then restore this image to another optiplex 740, it restores but with a large proportion of verification errors. that machine will then refuse to boot. You get a DOS message saying somethign about the disk not being bootable pres Ctrl+ALt+Del.

Please can somebody offer suggestions ASAP as i should have had 3 clones done last night for this morning and so far i still only have the 1 original working computer.

Thanks in advance.

[Alex]

Can you run a chkdsk on the original computer disk? We've encountered some problems with a similar situation.

You might want to make a RAW image, which is less problematic, doesn't rely on the file system being in a 100% sane state, and restore the RAW image to the other hard disks.

[DJ Eatch]

Hi Alex,
I will give the RAW image a go and see what happens.
But i believe we tried the chkdsk and it said it had to reboot 1st to free the files, and then once it booted up didn't scan and then gave the same message.

To shed some light on the matter, we took bot the original HDD from the Dell optiplex and the HDD from the optiplex we were cloning to and put them both in a HP machine - then booted from USB and did a HDD to HDD clone - this worked perfectly and passed all verifications.

This would lead me to believe that the issue is physically with the Optiplex 740's. Possibly their USB interface or their HDD controller or maybe as low as a BIOS issue.

At least there is way around it, but it does mean removing HDDs.