Beginner's question: changing hard disk

Sorry if that question has been asked a thousand time. There are defects on my laptop's hard disk and I will have to replace it by a blank hard disk in a few days. I would like to make a full image copy of my current hard disk and copy this back to the blank hard disk. Will this be possible with the bootable rescue media ? The image will be saved on a network drive but I wonder how the network drive will be accessible if nothing has been installed on the hard disk itself. Can the bootable rescue media access network drives without problems ? Should I use an external disk drive instead ?
I read the documentation but the response was not clear to me.
jdm

 

The bootable rescue CD is exactly what you want and is the only way to restore to a new blank HD.

The rescue CD does work with drives on another PC on a network. In the "filename" box in the wizard you may have to enter the location of the file by the UNC method to see any image files on the remote PC (\\pcname\folderpath\filename).

If you have an external USB2 HD then by all means put an image on it as well for extra safety.

You should boot the rescue CD (Create it if you haven't yet from the version you are using) and make sure you can connect to your other PC and validate an image contained on it to achieve some level of confidence that it will work. Also, do the same for the external HD.

Do not destroy your original drive in case something goes wrong and you have to re-install it.

There is no way of being totally confident the process will work if you have never tried it using the configuration.

 

Thank you very much. I will follow your advice.

 

I am glad I checked things beforehand. Although the boot CD-Rom is able to find the ethernet connection correctly, it does not find the network drives. However, the external hard disk was located without problems. I'll do the restore from there.

 

If you follow Seekforever's advice you shouldn't have any problems with your recovery process. What he wrote is totally correct.

However, this raises a question about what's been posted a couple of times. There's been a couple of threads about this course of action transferring "bad sectors" (if there is any) from the Old HD....to the New HD. Is this true guys? What exact steps do you take to avoid this?

Just curious because I'm facing the same situation, and will be replacing the HD in my daughters computer with a much better one.

 

It's my understanding that to avoid the bad sector flags to be transferred to a brand new blank HD you should perform a partition restore with resize. You should include all the partitions as well as the MBR and Track 0 in the restore operation. The resizing may be minimal (if the new drive is the same size) but every partition should be resized anyway.

I hope I'm forwarding Acronis Support info correctly this time.

 

I followed Seekforever's advice and found out how to find tib files located on network drives. I run into another problem: when using the boot CD-Rom, Acronis tells me that the tib file is not a correct Acronis data file and refuses to proceed with restore. If I access the same tib file under Windows with Acronis, there are no problems (I can access the tib file, open it, etc...). What should I do ?

 

If I understand the thread correctly, you are booting off the original, retrieving the image off the network and restoring the image to a new hard disk. As long as you are not restoring to your original disk then I would go ahead under Windows. Once you have restored the image, swap the hard disks and reboot. If it all works then you will get a message that Windows has found and installed new hardware and you need to reboot.
By the way, do not boot with the two disks connected at the same time otherwise Windows will change disk letters.

 

Thank you for the advice. In fact, I can only have one hard disk connected at the time and the new one is completely blank. I therefore needed to restore from the boot media using the image saved on a network drive. I managed to solve my problem by upgrading Acronis True Image to the latest version. The whole hard disk (51Gb of data compressed to a 25Gb tib file) was restored in less than 2 hours. Since this was my first time, I was a bit nervous but Acronis performed beautifully.

 

Hello tokjdm,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please note that most probably you try to restore the image archive when booted from Acronis True Image Bootable CD that was created with an old build (probably 2337 and lower). We recommend you to create a new Acronis True Image Bootable Rescue Media with the latest build, because each new build brings such improvements as better hardware support etc.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov