Replacing C Drive

[mickh]

I need to replace my C drive as I feel it's about to fail. What's the easiest way to do this with Acronis? I was going to creat an image (or clone) on an external HD then swap the C drive with the new one, boot from CD and restore the saved image to the new drive. Is that the best way, or could I plug the new drive into a spare bay (it would have to be a DVD drive bay) and copy the C drive and then switch them?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Xpilot]

-{ Quote: "I need to replace my C drive as I feel it's about to fail. What's the easiest way to do this with Acronis? I was going to creat an image (or clone) on an external HD then swap the C drive with the new one, boot from CD and restore the saved image to the new drive. Is that the best way, or could I plug the new drive into a spare bay (it would have to be a DVD drive bay) and copy the C drive and then switch them?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks" }-

You first choice to image is the best method. It is the safest because only one drive is installed in the computer and the old one is out of harm's way while the restore is performed.
It is also good to practice this method as it presumably would be the one you would use for future backups and restores.

Apart for setting the jumper on the new drive, if it has one, no other preparation of the new drive is necessary.
You should of course image the whole of the old drive and restore the lot, including the MBR to the new drive.

It would be a good idea to run CHKDSK R on the old drive before you create its image and if any bad sectors show up do a modicum of resizing when restoring to the new drive. This will ensure that no bad sectors are flagged on the new drive.

Another advantage of using this method of imaging is that no validation of the image need be performed. This is because you are not overwriting anything on the new drive and if the unlikely event of a failure it would be easy to start over.

Xpilot

[MudCrab]

The way I ususally do it is to save a full drive image to another drive (either internal, USB or a network share), then install the new drive, boot from the rescue media and restore from the saved image. It's a fairly simple procedure and you then have a backup available if you need to try again.

If you decide to clone the drive, I would still recommend creating a full drive image backup just in case. Also make sure you don't select the option to erase the original drive. You can always do that later after you're sure your new drive is setup and working correctly.

[mickh]

Thanks for your help. I'm assuming by your replies that I do not need to partition the new 500gb drive before restoring the image to it?

[MudCrab]

There is no need to partition the new drive prior to restoring the image as TI will just delete them before the restore.

If you need to resize the partition, check just the partition and resize it to what you want. Then, when TI asks if you want to restore any more drives/partitions, select Yes and check the MBR Track 0 box. If you have any other partitions just continue until you have gone through all of them. Then continue with the restore wizard.

If the new drive is larger than the old drive and you don't resize, you'll end up with unallocated space. You can use Windows Disk Management to create another partition if you want or use a partition editing program (like Disk Director) to resize the partition.

[mickh]

Thanks, I really appreciate your input.