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HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 2:07 pm
by bushtor
Hi,

I just purchased HD-Clone because it seemed to do exactly what I needed. I want to clone Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbooks from big USB sticks.

I made a 8Gb Flash Voyager bootable with HD-Clone and it started booting the Dell nicely displaying 'Loading SyMobi' until 100%, however after that nothing more happened. Blank screen and no reaction to keyboard or mouse input.

In another post here I saw that stopping at that point was probably due to problems with graphic drivers. The Dell netbooks in question use Intel Graphic Media Accelerator 500.

What can I do to solve this problem? Does symobi have a configuration setting for 'slow, but compatible graphics'..? Thanks a *lot* for tips on this as my time is running out to have this up and running.

I tested the HDClone USB boot stick on an older Dell system (Optiplex) and it booted and worked nicely. I had plenty of space left on the 8gig USB stick to store the image file, but I did not manage to have HDClone save the image file it created on its own boot drive. Is this normal? The drive was formatted with FAT32 initially.

Thanks for comments on these issues.

best regards tor

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 2:48 pm
by Alex
One could try to press the 'V' key during the boot process (when the progress bar is still below 100%). This activates the legacy VGA driver, which should increase compatibility. 'B' and 'D' can also be tried in different boot instances. They use different modes to set the graphic mode, either via the BIOS or direct by the boot loader (and not the graphic driver of HDClone).


As for saving the image on the boot drive: this should not be a problem. As long as the boot drive appears in the target selection, it should work - at least there are no restrictions as to rule out the boot device. In your case I'd look if there are any write errors during the copying process. A successful image on a drive lies in the directory "HDClone Images". If this directory is not there, then something went wrong. If it is there, then look for the subdirectory with the name you gave for the image. in this subdirectory, a file with the same name (and .img appended) should be lying, along with a varying number of files with hexadecimal numbers as their name.

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Tue Aug 11, 2009 11:27 am
by bushtor
Hi,

V and B gave me the same black screen as the default. D gave me lots of vertical green bars and distorted graphics which might have been characters written in a totally wrong format.

The boot drive was formatted with fat32 and made bootable from within HDClone.

The drive appears in the target drive selection but HDClone insists that the target is full when I select it (despite that it has 7.5Gb of free space). I don't understand why HDClone doesn't see that there is lot of available space on the stick.

regards

Tor

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Tue Aug 11, 2009 11:47 am
by Alex
Regarding the graphics: we'll have to look into this. Besides the graphics card it could also be an incompatible driver (esp. PS/2) that freezes the system.

Regarding the drive selection: If you're on the page where you can select the target image location (and name), just above the field "Format with FAT32" there are two lines, showing how large the image will be and how much space is on the disc.

The latter value is colored red if there's too little space on it. Otherwise, HDClone should not complain about the space.

Try using the SmartImage function to image only the used data instead of the complete disc with all the empty sectors.

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:00 pm
by Herm
Having the same problem as listed above. v, b, d give same results as reported above. Also tried a floppy disk with the same results.

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Wed Sep 23, 2009 9:14 am
by Alex
Did you try the latest version of HDClone, available via the link http://www.miray.de/public/download/hdclone.3.8.1.fe.en.zip ?

In any case, we are working on a new set of graphics drivers which should work better with any vesa mode, so we should have a screen in almost any case now.

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 8:28 pm
by Herm
Same results with 3.8.1 unless your usb load routine did not overwrite the previous load. Just a blank screen and the power off button is all that gets you out of it.
Will wait for the new graphics drivers.

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 11:40 pm
by night
Same Problem here.

I´m trying to boot the *.iso in a Win2k8 Server Edition which is running in a Virtual Box-VM.

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 12:21 am
by Herm
This thread has gone quiet. Does that mean there is a work-around or just lack of interest?

Re: HD Clone on Dell Inspiron Mini 10

PostPosted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:18 am
by Alex
Because of the lack of a proper test sample, we are considering different solutions for this. As different custom-built graphics drivers also don't work, we'll have to try other solutions, but until now to no avail. It will be stated here when a viable solution is available.