I was upgrading a PC, and everything was proceeding normally.

I get to the point where I clone the old hard drive to the new drive (after which I usually need to do a repair install of windows XP)… but I couldn’t clone the drive.

The target drive was a 250Gb Seagate sata drive… not large by todays standards… and nothing unusual about it.

The source drive was an 80Gb Samsung drive… also nothing unusual about it.

I thought that maybe my old version of ghost somehow couldn’t cope with the newer drive configurations, so I tried the latest acronis true image 2010, but it also failed with an error something like: “the clone failed, reason unknown”.

So: I look more closely at the source drive (I will assume, for now, that the new target drive is not at fault).

A check-disk reveals no errors. But I try acronis true image again, but with a slightly different configuration… but no go… I adjust the partitions a few different ways… but still no go.

OK, I decide to look at the contents of the source drive: I can see lots of temp windows files, and the drive is slightly fragmented.

So I clear out:

• windowstemp,
• windows$ntuninstallKB{long number}
• windowsKB*.log,
• documents and settings{user}local settingstemp,
• documents and settings{user}local settingsTemporary internet files,
• Anything directly in the folder that looks like a log file

I then defragment the drive.

I don’t know why I’m bothering with all this work… it probably won’t make any difference.

I then try the clone again: and this time it works perfectly… and very quickly as well!

I wouldn’t have thought that something like fragmentation or an excessive number of temp files would have caused a problem with a clone… but there it is!