Does Macrium Free Do Disk Cloning?

I have two identical 1T seagate drives and I am trying to clone from one to the other.

One is the system disk with drives C: and E: on it - that's the source drive - and the other is a drive I've labelled 'J:' via Diskpart - that's the target drive.

Previous attempts to clone have all failed and the error message I get is that D: is inaccessible.

So I've processed the target drive through Diskpart, partitioning it, making it active, formatting it.
On repeats of this process I've even taken the time to do a slow format, that hasn't helped either.

And it still hasn't worked so I've done the Diskpart stuff again - had to, the drive was inaccessible from Explorer after the Macium abort - and run chkdsk which has reported no errors at all.

So then I've used Explorer to copy files across and it has all seemed to work fine.

So then I've tried the cloning again. And it has failed again.

Now the thing is - drive D: ? It reports drive D: as inaccessible. But why D:? There's no D: in my system.

Usually that would be the DVD writer. But not here now. My DVD drive is F:, I don't know why, but it is.

And I am trying to copy a disk that has drive letters C: and E: associated with it, only, not D:

To drive J:

But Macrium seems to get the wrong idea and then do something to screw things up so's I do have a drive D: and it is not accessible.

Is there something with Macrium that it can't handle 'out of normal order' drive letter sequences? Or does Macrium free not handle cloning?

I read the tutorial in these threads but it didn't seem to mention cloning unless I was too hurried and overlooked it.

My problem is a flaky drive C: - or that disk, meaning C: and E: - and I'd like to keep my whole system because there's much software installed.

So as a sort of second part to this question what best route for me to take in the interim if I can't get a successful clone from Macrium?


As I write it is copying the whole of the Documents folder, I'm doing it again.

Yes I know the option is there. That's the option I chose to begin the process that failed - numerous times.

The 'flaky' drive I have played up some time ago giving me constant errors on boot up requiring a disk check by Windows.

I have another thread on these forums where it is discussed. Someone gave me a clue on how to fix a major problem and I did that. And I was able to chkdsk and find and fix all bad sectors.

Since then it is running okay. But, of course, I do not trust it. The time is ripe to get a clone of it while it is still good.

Hence this query. What about the drive D: thing? Macrium is doing something funny or there's something funny, still, on my hard drive and I need a way to find out which and/or what.

Just an FYI - When cloning, its best to perform that operation while running under the Macriums Recovery Disk. If the OP is using the Recovery disk, than please dis-regard this post.

storageman said:

Just an FYI - When cloning, its best to perform that operation while running under the Macriums Recovery Disk. If the OP is using the Recovery disk, than please dis-regard this post.

Aha... I am not doing that. But I did make the disk and I will try again, using it.

I did that explorer copy of 'Documents and Settings' over to this destination disk as a test. That's 180G. And it all copied fine. So it certainly looks to me like the destination drive is fine.

Thanks for the tip about DH Tune and Hard Disk Sentinel.