[Jeff]

I havent had good luck with HD clone and I'm a bit disappointed. I first tried this a few months ago, same thing happened, it would stop at some point and the % complete and sectors would not change. I thought it was my computer so I still suggested HD Clone to the IT guy ay work and he bought the enterprise version...it created the ISO image, but while restoring he always had problems and he never figured out.

Now I am trying to rebuild my laptop and while cloning it stops at 72% and remains there forever. The sectors dont change. I tried the Ctrl+Alt+F8 as suggested in another page here and tried /emb>procinfo and it gave me a list of items, which means HD Clone had an exception? I am not sure how to make it work now. May be it stops in one particular sector? No way to skip that sector?

I am cloning it using HD Clone disk at start up, without loading windows. What other info do you need to figure what's wrong?

[Alex]

Please make sure you use the newest version of HDClone, i.e. Version 3.9.3, which is available for download using your license key.

The complete stop at 72% is a bit puzzling, since complicated (and error-prone) actions are only done at the beginning and the end of the copying process, but during the cloning only normal file reads are performed.

If it stops, you could create a log file (pressing Ctrl+Alt+F8, plugging in an USB flash drive, then entering
writelog.en log
on the commandline and selecting the flash drive as target. A log file containing the exception info will be stored on the drive (under the name CLONE001.LOG or a higher number). Please send this file to us at support@miray.de for inspection.

[Jeff]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your prompt reply, I appreciate it. I downloaded the new version (it's for my personal laptop so I only used the free version) and tried again and it worked!!! I am so excited, first time did a complete clone.

Anyway, it gave me a report in the end:

The image created is erroneous
The image has not been verified

And then the source and target drive details, image name...etc..and then:

Sectors copied: 117,307,450
Read errors: 67
Write errors: 0
and...time and data copied, which was 57,279 mb

From the report, it seems like it had some read errors (may be that was why it was freezing earlier?) but the question is, can I still use the image file and retrieve it later without problems?

let me know if the read errors would complicate data integrity and retrieval later

Thanks...you have some really cool tools and your forum support is very good as well.

[Alex]

It really depends on where the read errors occurred. Apparently, they occurred where the drive had to give up, after more read tries. If the drive you copied works fine, I suspect no control structures are affected by it, but probably some files you very seldom use lead to this read error, otherwise you'd have found something when using the file normally.

The problem with the image is now: if you store it back to another disk, these erroneous sectors have all Zeros (HDClone writes this as default value), so if you have e.g. an image that starts with a correct sector, but continues with an erroneous, and finishes with a correct sector, only the image displaying application will complain, as the data in between makes no sense, and since there are no check sums for files in NTFS, the file system won't notice the data read is not what was supposed to be read.

To sum it up: yes, you can use the image, but you might experience that some files are somewhat corrupted. But you will do this too with the current source disc, only the operating system will tell you so on reading from these sectors, b/c they get a read error. On the other hand, usually these sector damages occur grouped together, so probably only one or two files are affected. I cannot say though which files that would be.

[Jeff]

Ok...I see what you mean. I didnt experience any problems now so probably those files are ones that are seldom used.

Anyway, thanks for your prompt, clear replies, helped me a lot.

Thanks