Write Error with Disk Cloning in Fore...

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Author Message   Mike Cronin Username: mikec Registered: N/A Posted on Friday, Jun 27, 2008 - 19:37:    Folks, I'm trying to use 'Clone Disk' between two USB attached hard drives. Each has a primary partition of 10Gig (NTFS) that I wish to clone, one to the other. Each partition (source & destination) is assigned a drive letter, and I'm using Vista with UAC disabled. I have verified that I can write the destination using Vista. When I attempt to use Forensic v14.5 'Disk Clone' and specify the source and desination logical drives, I receive an "Error 21" which states: "Cannot write to Drive Y:. Access is denied." Can someone advise? Thanks and regards --Mike Cronin   Stefan Fleischmann Username: admin Registered: 1-2001 Posted on Saturday, Jun 28, 2008 - 16:01:    I recommend removing the drive letter from the destination partition so that Vista does not protect it as much any more. Then you open the destination hard disk in WinHex or X-Ways Forensics and from there open the destination partition and specify that as the destination for cloning.   Stefan Fleischmann Username: admin Registered: 1-2001 Posted on Saturday, Jun 28, 2008 - 16:02:    Overwriting an NTFS volume that is still mounted is not something I would recommend anyway because of the buffer that Windows keeps for such volumes.   Mike Cronin Username: mikec Registered: N/A Posted on Sunday, Jun 29, 2008 - 2:02:    Stefan, Thank you for your responses. * I did try your first recommendation, but it did not work. However, your recommendation led me to wonder about Vista. and I have discovered the issue to be with the OS. I tried the same task with another machine in our lab that has XP instead, and the clone is successful. * Your second post about overwriting a mounted NTFS volume is interesting. Can you expand a bit on the why? The reason I was doing this was to replicate a laptop hard disk to a larger disk, and this 10Gig partition was the recovery partition. Should I be aware of something concerning the buffer? Best Regards, --Mike   Stefan Fleischmann Username: admin Registered: 1-2001 Posted on Sunday, Jun 29, 2008 - 14:00:    Only that Windows buffers changes to a mounted NTFS volume and lazily writes the buffer to the disk.