1737 clone attempt after 2nd HD install - auto reboot failure

Question

Clone of drive 1 proceeds through 65% completion of operation 4 of 5 and I assume finishes that operation. After an hour or so the computer goes into sleep mode rather than rebooting. I think the operation completed. I try to boot with press of blinking power button. Machine starts to boot; some device staus lights sequentially flash as they do when booting but the process halts with power and disc lights on steady (no disc activity). This has happened 3 times. For the previous two tries like this the DiscWizard log shows termination by user at the 4th entry, perhaps because when this happened before and there was no response I held the power button down for a power down in order to reboot. The result of the cloning is that there is an unallocated partition on the second drive of the proper size (which should be the cloned C), and there is a recovery partition of the remainder which seems to be a successful clone of the original recovery partition. It seems the reboot failure prevents the writing of the clone C. ?? Tips very much appreciated.

Dell Studio 1737 Laptop - Vista - Internal drives
drive 1: Hitachi 232.9 GB (250 GB) HT5543225L9A300 FEBO
drive 2: Seagate Momentus ST9750420AS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive

cloning program: Seagate (Acronis) DiscWizard ver. 11.0.0.8326

brookefox · Accepted Answer

I went through the process of booting from sleep into a blank screen with disc activity continuing for a long while several times, then figuring if it was a desired write process as a part of the cloning that it had gone on long enough, I cold booted from sleep so as to get a display back. At that point DiscWizard claimed to have completed! The unit was still booting from the original drive, so I entered the boot menu, which did not allow me to change the boot HD, and then setup which seemed to allow it at the boot sub-menu , by changing drive positions on the list, rather than by some more explicit and clear process. Several warm boots for mysterious driver updates later, the unit is booting from the new drive, now designated C, as a result of DiscWizard's actions. ADVICE: disable sleep and other power saving options prior to cloning so as to perhaps maintain a visible display.

brookefox · Answer

UPDATE: On retuning to the unit I find it has re-entered sleep mode so I again try to reboot. This time it goes through the device status light flashing sequence and the disk light shows continuous activity, but the screen remains blank. I think maybe it is writing the clone.... Later I notice it is sleeping so I again try to reboot and and the sequence seems to be repeating.

brookefox · Answer

If I get no better ideas, I'll try the process with sleep mode disabled.

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1737 clone attempt after 2nd HD install - auto reboot failure