Solved Macrium reflect just wiped out my destination drive failed to do the clone

I cloned my older sata windows drive today onto an SSD

Booted and SSD is good.
upgraded SS to win 11
So I thought why not clone the SSD back to the SATA disk 0

So it crashed on the second partition c: when trying to do the clone which Macrium then left as unallocated
Macrium complained about a disk error

I will like to clone disk 3 onto disk 0
What other free program do you use for cloning?

sdowney717 said:

I cloned

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Another reason I never clone only images.

giving disk genious a try

Porthos said:

Another reason I never clone only images.

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I cloned in windows 10 that WDC onto the Samsung SSD using Samsung Magician and it worked ok.

Will test later, see if it boots. Was thinking use it as a backup.

I dont know why a clone is not as good idea as an image?
If you have a clone, you can set it to boot from the bios and no down time, unless it is damaged.
Both drives are the same size. Maybe if they were not same size image is better?

Remember that the MR bootable rescue media, has a wonderful tool called: Fix Boot Problems.
And it also gives you access to a command prompt.

sdowney717 said:

I dont know why a clone is not as good idea as an image?

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I think the question should be... WHY would I ever want to clone?

I don't clone disks. Ever. I've simply seen too many people here suggest the creation / restoration of an image, so I've trusted their judgment, and this has served me well.

Again, I have no experience with clones, just telling you what has worked consistently for me 100% of the time.

The issue is with the source drive having errors on it. No imaging tool can properly clone a drive with errors on it.

If you image with Reflect, there is an option to ignore read errors BUT it does not guarantee image is sound.

In all honesty, you should backup valuable data and do a clean install on new drive.

I only use offline/hardware cloning and only same size drives or Destination drive larger than Source source. I'd consider imaging-use if having to go from large to smaller drive.

What I see in #1 image is if Disk 0 [H:] is for data storage it would be better to have only a single partition of full size.

sdowney717 said:

I dont know why a clone is not as good idea as an image?

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All to do in the skill, knowledge and experience of the user(s)

Forums across the internet are filled with tears from failed clone attempts, far more greater so than the number of request for help about imaging > restoring.

sdowney717 said:

unless it is damaged.

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... which it frequently appears to become, for whatever reason(s). Ess-aitch-one-tee happens.

Berton said:

I only use offline/hardware cloning and only same size drives or Destination drive larger than Source source. I'd consider imaging-use if having to go from large to smaller drive.

Click to expand...

makes sense.
Honestly if drives are same size, don't see why not. An image could also have errors. it is stored on a drive just like a clone.

idgat said:

Forums across the internet are filled with tears from failed clone attempts, far more greater so than the number of request for help about imaging > restoring.

Click to expand...

Have had only one failed hardware clone and it was because I got in a hurry and failed to first run Error Checking on the Source drive followed by Defragging. Fortunately didn't need finishing until next day so wiped the Destination drive and started over.

Some reasons spoken for both imaging and cloning
And a whole lot of programs to do that

Q: Should I clone my Windows drive?

A: You watched too many Star Wars movies... and not just the original three... (the good ones).

6 minute countdown
It is doing it 'HOT', said it uses a system snapshot.

The clone boots fine!
I am postng here using that drive now.
It is slow to boot being a spinner.
I can do a SFC /scannow

On this PC, hit F11 while booting and it gives you the boot menu to select drives.

SFC did find some errors and fixed them
Still it is functioning. This is an old drive and the SMART data shows some issues.

Smart ID 199, Cables issue, it tries to send data and it fail so it retries. Seen that on multiple various spinner drives.

UDMA CRC error count is a S.M.A.R.T. parameter that indicates the total quantity of CRC errors during UltraDMA mode123. It reads the cumulative quantity of CRC errors during data transfer between the host and the disk1. The raw value of this attribute indicates the number of errors found during data transfer in UltraDMA mode by ICRC (Interface CRC)23. The issue is often caused by a faulty, kinked, or poorly seated SATA cable/connection4.

HA, I decided to do a sfc on the SSD drive currently the one I use on the PC and it found the same issue that was on the WDC.
Don't know where that corruption occurred but most likely while cloning using Samsung Magician from WDC to SSD as afterwards I reverse cloned using Disk Genius back to the WDC drive. Or it was already on the WDC, from before the first clone,
But I thought I recall checking SFC before I cloned anything.
If I feel up to it, I could look at the logs and compare what SFC found on both disks

Still everything is running fine for both drives.

One error related to direct x on the ssd


Several errors related to http on the WDC and one for directX
so the errors are entirely different between the drives, means to me it is not related to cloning
I also ran sfc on my much newer dell 7530 and also had some corrupted issues and looking at the file they were all directX related