Acronis TI Home 2009 restoring from USB drive images to SATA hard drive

Hello folks,

I haven't owned/used Acronis in a few years now and what I am doing now would have worked in the 'old days'. I am attempting to clone the original hard drive (120GB) to a larger (300GB) hard drive.

This is what I have done:
1. Connected an external USB hard drive to computer;

2. Boot from the TI 2009 rescue CD (TI Home 2009 doesn't want to install in Vista Home - but that is moot with this issue);

3. Backed up a Compaq Desktop SATA drive with 2 partitions: main boot drive c: and hidden rescue partition d: to 4.5 GB images (IT created 7 sequential images) with compression and verification turned on;

4. Replaced original SATA drive with larger SATA drive;

5. Boot from the rescue CD and selected restore entire drive;

6. Select TI image from external USB drive as source. And select entire drive (all partitions);

7. Select new SATA drive as destination drive. Oddly enough, the primary drive is appearing as the secondary drive (DISK 2). The USB drive appears as DISK 1. The BIOS is definitely set to give the external USB drive a secondary placement! Also, the CD drive (where Acronis TI is booting from is current C: drive and this seems to interfere with the restoration as well);

8. Confirmation shows that original boot drive (from TI images) was C: drive but will be changed to D: drive. The D: restore partition will change from D: to F: drive! Why?

9. Proceeding anyway... the moment the restoration process begins, an error pops-up stating, "Error opening the file"..... At this point the USB drive letter is lost;

What am I doing wrong?
This should be a pretty straight-forward backup and restore!
Both the CD drive and the external hard drive SHOULD NOT interfere with the restoration.

My next step is to do a direct drive to drive clone (rather than drive to image -image to drive).


Your assistance is greatly appreciated!

 

In step 5, since you are moving to a larger drive, you will want to select each partition but do not check the disk option. You will need to resize each partition as illustrated in my guide. Also, upon completiion, disconnect the source before first bootup.

The 2009 guide below can provide some examples but you should first review the guide listed on line 3 of my signature below.

http://grover.tabinc.com/gh-temp/2009-4946.pdf

 

@sconelly

regarding the drive letter handling using rescue-cd see here: Click

 

Thanks for all your kind replies.

I ended up cloning the hard drive instead!

Since this computer only has two SATA ports, I had to disconnect the CD drive in order to connect both the original and the new hard drive.

Then I created a bootable Acronis recovery USB key (The HP Drive Key Boot Utility or cp006049.exe seems necessary to accomplish this).

After the clone completed, I disconnected the source drive and rebooted.

Everything worked perfectly.

Your input is valuable because I may only have an Acronis image to make a recovery from, in the future.

Thanks again