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How does the Solitaire™ determine the size of partitions on the target drive? |
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In the default CleverCopy™ mode, all known partitions (FAT16/FAT32/NTFS/Windows 200) are scaled proportionally to the ratio of master/target size. All unknown partitions (e.g. HPFS, LINUX, UNIX etc.) are mirrored, that is they maintain their size. Please note that FAT16 partitions cannot exceed 2.1GB when scaled up, nor be smaller than 32MB when scaled down. |
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Can the Solitaire™ de-fragment a partition? |
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Yes. Use the Selective mode, scroll to the desired partition, and toggle the icon to the left of it until the de-frag symbol appears. Hit CLONE NOW! Button twice to start the cloning session. De-fragmenting is somewhat slower than other cloning methods, and is currently available to FAT16/FAT32 partitions only. |
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Why do I sometimes see transfer speeds greater than 975MB/min, and other times as low as 200MB/min? |
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There are many factors that determine transfer speed:
The age of the drives - The speed of the operation is governed by the slowest drive in the system. If an old drive is used, chances are it cannot sustain high transfer speed. Newer drives have faster electronics and larger caches, and can sustain rates as high as 16MB/sec.
The type of operation performed - When cloning FAT16 partitions, it is sometimes necessary to change the cluster class of the partition. It such cases, the Solitaire™ "engages" a more complex algorithm to ensure proper alignment of structures on the target. This results in a slower process.
Master drive with bad or weak sectors - With the Sector Recovery option enabled, the system will attempt to recover data from bad or weak sectors found on the master drive. This is a time consuming operation that could cause the overall speed of cloning to drop. |
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Can the Solitaire™ clone file systems such as UNIX, LINUX, and HPFS? |
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Yes, but results are guaranteed only if cloned between identical drives. However, it is reported that UNIX partitions will self-repair upon the first boot. |
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Do target drives have to be partitioned and formatted prior to copying? |
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No. Target drives need not be partitioned or otherwise treated. The Solitaire™ disregards everything on the target drive, and re-formats and partitions the target automatically. |
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My target drive will not boot. Why? |
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Please check several things:
If the target drive is larger than 4GB, and is hosted by a PC with a Phoenix BIOS dated earlier than Nov. 1997, you may need to set the CHS translation setting to Large, and try to clone again. If this is not the case, please check that the above setting is NOT set to Large, but rather to the default setting: LBA.
Make sure that the first partition selected for cloning on the master consists of a valid operating system, like Win98. Since it is perfectly OK to select a data-only partition to be cloned, one cannot expect to be able to boot from such target.
The Master drive is corrupted. This may not show-up with casual booting of the master, but problems such as cross-linked clusters can cause serious cloning errors. We recommend checking every master with Scandisk prior to cloning. Future software versions of Solitaire™ will allow "scandisking" the master on the unit. |
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All but the first partition is missing from the target drive? How did that happen? |
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This is usually a result of a wrong CHS translation setting. Hit the Set button, and scroll down to the CHS translation mode item. Toggle to the other state (LARGE or LBA), and try to clone again. |
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How does the Solitaire™ with the Diagnostics option installed handle bad sectors on the Master and Target drives? |
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Bad (or "weak") sectors on the Master drive are handled in the following way:
By default the first option is "Abort", the Solitaire™ will abort the capture process upon encountering the first bad sector. Note that the Solitaire™ ™ will still make several attempts to correctly read the sector in question, but unless a perfect read was achieved, the process will abort.
The second option is "Skip". When this option has been selected, the Solitaire™ ™ will still make several attempts to achieve a perfect read, but will move past the bad or weak sector instead of aborting.
The third option is "Retry". This option instructs the Solitaire™ ™ to spend more time attempting to read all of the data from the bad or weak sector. This option can slow down the clone process.
The fourth option is "Recover". When selected, the Solitaire™ ™ will use a more complex algorithm in an attempt to retrieve as much data as possible from each bad or weak sector. Although this option is very effective at recovering data from bad or weak sectors, it can be time consuming. |
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Are NT 4GB FAT16 partitions supported? |
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Yes. |
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How does the Solitaire™ handle NT Security Identification (SID) issues? |
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The Solitaire™ duplicates the SID. It is recommended that a SID changer be installed on the master drive, so that the next time the target is booted-up, all SID's will be replaced with fresh ones. The user manual describes this process in detail. Any one of a number of freeware and for-fee SID changers can be used. A freeware SID changer is available at: http://www.sysinternals.com Logicube cannot assume responsibility to this third party software, and can only offer limited technical support. |
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The Solitaire™ does not recognize my master (or target) drive? |
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Make sure that the drive jumpers are set as a single master. Drive jumper settings can be found at the drive manufacturer’s web site. Also, check the condition of the power and data cables; they are rated for a maximum of 500 insertions. New cable sets can be ordered from Logicube sales. |
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I receive the error: "Drive error– either the speed setting is too high, or a bad sector was encountered". What is causing this? |
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This error is typically the result of using older (slower) drives or drives that have weak or bad sectors. Defragmenting the master drive, or setting the speed setting to slow can sometimes resolve this error. |
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10 Basic Steps Needed to Create a Master Manager Drive. |
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1. Install a drive inside the Solitaire Turbo™. This drive will become the Master Manager drive.
2. Attach the source drive that contains the desired partition to the target (external) position.
3. Press the SET button.
4. Press SELECT on MODE.
5. Scroll to MASTER MANAGER, then press SELECT followed by START/STOP.
6. The Solitaire Turbo™ will change the CLONE DIRECTION from M>T to T>M automatically so you do not need to worry about writing to the source (external) drive by mistake. The drives will spin up and the partition table on the source (external) drive will be read and displayed in a list on the LCD display.
7. If there is more than one partition on the source (external) drive, you will be able to scroll through each one. Scroll to the desired partition and then press SELECT followed by START/STOP, the Solitaire Turbo™ will issue a warning that a portion of the Master Drive will be overwritten --this is because the drive inside the unit will be written to. Note that a maximum of ONE partition can be selected per operation.
8. The partitions (if any) on the Master Manager (internal) drive are read and displayed on the LCD display. If there are no partitions, the display will only show "ADD NEW PARTITION".
9. The Solitaire Turbo™ will only display partitions that exist on the Master Manager drive if they are large enough to be overwritten with that data that was selected in step 7. Basically, the user at this point will be able to overwrite an existing partition (if large enough), or ADD a new partition if the drive has adequate unpartitioned freespace.
10. Press START/STOP to begin. A maximum of 24 partitions can be added.
A note on volume labels --the unit reads the existing volume label from the source drive. If there are no volume labels, the unit will display: "NO NAME" followed by the filesystem type (e.g. 32, 16, NT).
Once a partition has been added to the Master Manager drive, it can only be deleted by using FDISK, DISK ADMINISTRATOR, etc. or by being overwritten with another partition. |
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How does the Solitaire™ without the Diagnostics option installed handle bad sectors on the Master and Target drives? |
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The Solitaire™ will abort the copy process if it encounters a bad sector. |
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Can you briefly explain the difference between mirror copy and CleverCopy™? |
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Mirror copy merely copies all sectors in a given partition (or drive) from the beginning to the specified percentage. It does not look at drive structures, and can thus copy any type of known or unknown data. Since Mirror copy does not determine where useful data start and stop, it ends up copying every sector on the drive, a time consuming operation.
CleverCopy™ analyzes the drive structures, and not only does it only copy sectors that are occupied by useful files and data, it also adjusts the various drive structures to assure a valid and fully partitioned target drive. CleverCopy™ is by far the most recommended mode of cloning. |
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Can I copy from a larger drive to a smaller drive? |
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Yes. As long as the data content of each partition fits into the scaled down size of its corresponding partition. Otherwise, an error message will be displayed indicating that the Echo/Solitaire/OmniClone cannot fit data to the target drive(s).
NTFS partitions can be scaled down by approximately 60% due to the master file table that resides in the center of each partition. The error "Cannot fit data to target" can also be caused by a badly fragmented master drive. In such cases, defragmenting the master will generally resolve the issue. |
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Can I clone to/from laptop drives? |
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Yes. Logicube sells 2.5" drive adapters, and can provide adapters to many of the special drive connections on the market. Please call for availability. Or, in cases where the drive cannot be removed from the laptop, you can use the parallel port connection or the CloneCard™ for coping through the PCMCIA interface. |
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Can I clone drives with virus protection software installed? |
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Yes. But remember to decline the "repair" of the target drive should a virus protection program complain about altered master boot record etc. |
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Why do I have an un-partitioned free space at the end of my target drive? |
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This typically occurs when the master drive has FAT16 partitions only, and the target is much larger. FAT16 partitions cannot scale to more than 2.1GB each. FAT32 and NTFS partitions do not suffer from this limitation and will always be scaled up to fill the target drive. |
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Why do I receive ''Not Enough Memory'' when running Scandisk or Defragment on cloned Windows 9.x systems? |
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This error occurs because both Scandisk and Defrag cannot handle the increased number of clusters that exist when targets larger than 8GB have been cloned from master drives smaller than 8GB. This only applies to FAT32. See the table below for more information.
Workarounds:
1) On Solitaire™, change the default CleverCopy™ mode to Selective. Once Selective has been chosen, press Select twice on the source partition to Defragment during the Clone. This will resize the clusters according to the table below.
2) On OmniClone™, the unit must have Selective Partitions option enabled and set as the copy mode with defrag selected on the source partition (just as above with Solitaire™).
If Selective Partitions has not been enabled, the user can resize the source partition with a utility such as Partition Magic. Please note though that you must increase the cluster size beyond what the table below shows for a given partition size. Here's an example...
Source drive is 4.0 GB and has a single FAT32 partition. This drive will have 4KB clusters by default. The default CleverCopy™ mode will create 4KB clusters on targets of any size, which can cause the "Not Enough Memory" errors if the targets are large enough.
To resolve this, the user can resize the clusters on the Source drive to 8, 16, or 32 KB.
FAT16
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Cluster size Partition Size
2 KB 128 MB
4 KB 256 MB
8 KB 512 MB
16 KB 1 GB
32 KB 2 GB
FAT32
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Cluster size Partition Size
2 KB < 260 MB
4 KB 260 MB - 8 GB
8 KB 8 GB - 16 GB
16 KB 16 GB - 32 GB
32 KB 32 GB<
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