Couldn't use acronis to image Win 8.1 so had to reinstall

[high_revs]

Issue #1
Still using Acronis 11 (home). For some odd reason, it wouldn't clone the larger but traditional 1TB drive to a 512GB SSD drive. No biggie as I read these things don't always work well.

So I tried to do a system image backup and just do a restore on the smaller drive. Oddly, Acronis wouldn't recognize the C: 1TB. I couldn't find information that this old version of Acronis isn't compatible with Win 8.1. I even tried booting from the usb and disk drive but couldn't make it work.

Any other [free] utility to do this in the future? I just finished a re-install so that's fine now but just in case I need to do it again. Usually I take an image after an install and do incrementals after to make life easier should the machine have a meltdown and I can restore fast.

Issue #2
Seems my Acronis 11 Home edition is truly out of since it wont even do a drive cleanser/format for the second drive, which was the original 1TB traditional hdd. Something about not supporting dynamic volumes. The BIOS doesn't have a low level format option. I tried to do it via computer management -> disk management but alas, no go. I can only delete the partition for the OS but not the rest.

Options here? I don't have a floppy/usb anymore that has fdisk though I'm not sure fdisk would work on win 8.1? I just want the 2nd drive clean as it'll be the working disk for storage.

disregard #2. I used diskpart to clean all the partitions on the 1TB drive.

[stilly]

Macrium might do a better job. Macrium worked good for Windows Vista and for a job or two with Windows 7. Also, I found what worked last time for me was that within windows there is an option to make a system image and that worked for me 100% last time I had issues.

Acronis was good back in the day and it worked excellent for all things XP. But now I aint so sure about it anymore.

If you had space on your SSD then it should have done that for you. Maybe you can try the newer Acronis 2014. There is also a 2015 but it kinda sucked when I tried it last.

[high_revs]

thanks stilly. i'll have to read up on the native windows system image. i've not actually tried that or used it. just hate to buy a new software for something i won't do all the time (unlike when i used to do my own installs for my work pc, since i can get it done much faster than helpdesk IT).

the ssd had space since i cleaned up a lot of files and moved them to the NAS, and planned to mvoe them back later to the 1TB drive once the image copy was done.

anyway, since i keep this desktop simple (no ms office or anythign). it wasn't too long of an install yesterday.

[stilly]

thanks stilly. i'll have to read up on the native windows system image. i've not actually tried that or used it. just hate to buy a new software for something i won't do all the time (unlike when i used to do my own installs for my work pc, since i can get it done much faster than helpdesk IT).

the ssd had space since i cleaned up a lot of files and moved them to the NAS, and planned to mvoe them back later to the 1TB drive once the image copy was done.

anyway, since i keep this desktop simple (no ms office or anythign). it wasn't too long of an install yesterday.

I used the windows image within windows since other things were not working as a proper restore. It was slow and ate up a lot of space.

I dunno if you can move it without issues though.

Macrium might be what you want if all you want is to make an image and move it around.

Also, Acronis has issues with SATA. If you are running Acronis 11 check that you can see SATA hard drives. It hit me later tonight that that could have been your issue as well. That was why I went to Acronis 2014 or newer than an older version anyways. Macrium actually recognized the volume and the drive and it was free so I went with it. Macrium worked great for Vista and it seemed to work okay for windows 7. I had an issue with it recently, but I think the issue was that I did not run the ms startup repair after restoring an image.

Hope it works out for you. Macrium Reflect is free and might be a good program to use.