WD Smartware Pro does not back up a PC’s OS (Win10 in my case), which is why I tried to use the Acronis True Image WD Edition. Unfortunately, this did not work properly … I received the following error message after it reached the 100% cloning Point: Segmentation Fault (error code 139).
Prior to this operation, I attempted to reformat my WD external drive (My Book Essentials) to its factory settings, but was unable to get past the point that told me to close any applications that might be competing for the drive’s attention. I tried everything, even uninstalling the usual suspects like Smartware Pro and disabling my Norton Security app. Nothing worked. Ultimately, I was forced to disconnect the drive and reboot to see if the culprit would identify themselves. No luck. I rebooted again and reconnected the drive at an arbitrary point in the process and got past the close-all-apps obstacle. I then downloaded Acronis, which leads me to my opening sentence above … A classic loop!!
I would not make a cone of your hard drive to a USB drive since it isn’t supported. You would want to create an image file. This would be recovered to a new internal drive if you had a failure. You can also use Windows Backup and Restore under Control Panel to see if you can create a Windows System Image. If both fail, I would run a error check on your computer’s internal drive to see if there is an issue with that.
A backup is just data, no OS or installed programs. An image backup is just a single, recoverable file that contains everything on the hard drive but cannot boot from it. A clone is a sector by sector copy of the original hard drive. This is done when making a backup boot drive or when you are upgrading your hard drive (500GB to a 2TB drive)
So, if I wanted to make a backup boot drive I would first clone my internal HDD? Would the cloned drive include all files and installed programs? If so, could I then restore everything by booting from the cloned drive via the F12-BIOS? And the restore could be to either my internal HDD or a replacement (including a SSD) for it?
Many thanks for your responses … I now see some light at the end of this dark and gloomy tunnel.
The cloned hard drive would be an exact copy of your internal drive. You could remove your old drive, install the clone, and not see any difference other than the capacity if you clone to a larger drive. Acronis has an automatic feature that I have used many times to upgrade a computer’s hard drive such as cloning a 320GB hard drive to a 750GB hard drive and the Acronis setup the partitions automatically.
