Hi All !

I've just experienced the strangest thing, and it's really got me stumped.

I've bought a couple of Samsung F1 1TB drives. I'm currently using two Western Digital 500 GB drives in my system, and since I didn't want to go through the trouble of re-installing my system, I decided to clone the boot disk.

For this I used Acronis True Image 10 (and 11 in a second try).

Since I only own one desktop PC, and I've learned before that it's not a good idea to try and clone the OS/bootdisk on the same system the disk is currently running from, I decided to remove the disk from the system, put it in an external USB enclosure and connect it to my laptop. I also put the new destination 1 TB disk in a different enclosure and also connected it to my laptop. After this, I started the cloning process.

The original disk was partitioned in one primary partition of 50 GB (OS) and one extended partition with one logical partition of 400 GB (approx.) for the data. I used the automatic settings of Arconis True image, which means the partitions on the destination disk are created with the same percentage of storage. (in this case, simply doubled: 100 GB OS partition, 800 GB data partition).

The cloning itself too HOURS, way too much in my opinion, but I put this down to the sluggishness of the USB 2 interfaces both harddisks were subjected to.

After ten hours or so, the cloning was successfully finished. I could see in my Windows Drive management screen that the cloning was indeed successful. All partitions were made, and all data was copies. I could access the data on the cloned drive (the Samsung 1 TB).

I then removed the disk from the system (via the 'remove USB device icon etc), and put the disk into my main desktop system. Result: error, no boot. Strange.

I put the disk back into the USB enclosure and connected it again to the laptop. What I saw then blew my mind! In the Windows disk management software, I could see the disk, but it only showed as a disk of 32 MB! No more! I can partition this space if I want to, but also removing the partition does not show a larger disk size than 32 MB anymore.

I'm guessing this is the 32 MB of cache that is showing, and that the diskspace of 1 TB is 'gone' (no idea where!). I also booted a Knoppix Linux CD to see if it showed the same thing, and it did! For some reason this disk has been transformed from a 1 TB disk into a 32 MB disk!

I tried low-level formatting it, but the low level application refuses to start because the disk is too small!

I then guess this was maybe a one-off, and beacuse I used Acronis True Image 10. I then downloaded version 11. Then, after another 10 hours of cloning, I ended up with exactly the same 'symptom'. That second disk had also turned into a 32 MB disk! Talk about strange!

I have NEVER experience this before, and I don't know what to do, other than trade in these disks under warranty (which won't be a problem BTW, but I would rather know what's causing this!).

Why does this happen? Could this be because I cloned them via the USB interface instead of connecting them straight to the SATA interface. Even better: anyone got any idea how I can fix this?

Thanks for any input you can provide!