Clone my C drive to External drive?

hi,
2 questions here.

1] can I clone my Main C drive to an external WD 500 gig hard drive"V" to keep it there until I get around to buying a new drive to clone it back to and, assuming I choose NOT to destroy old files will I still be booting to my normal C drive after I have shut down and NOT booting to my external V drive?

2] I have the installation disk for ATI 9 so is that my "boot disk" the software says you need to boot up.?

thank u..

 

When you set up the cloning operation I think there is an option to wipe or remove the partitions or files onthe origianl disk. Don't check anything like that if you want ot keep both disks with all the content. Unless you tell it to "empty" the original disk, cloning should have no effect on it.

 

Either the installation CD or the CD created with the Acronis Media Builder program. If you haven't updated to the latest build of TI 9 (or at least build 3,677), then you may want to consider it. The earlier builds were quite buggy. After you update, use Media Builder to create a new TI 9 CD.

 

TonyR:

From re-reading your original post it sounds like your best bet would be to skip the cloning operation and just store an image of your current disk drive on your external USB drive.

When you have received your new hard disk, install it in place of your existing hard disk, boot from the recovery CD and then restore the image of your old hard disk to the new hard disk.

The disadvantage of cloning is that it will turn your external USB drive into an identical copy of your current C: drive and that's that. You will then lose the ability to do anything else with your external drive. Conversely, if you create an image of your current drive the result is a file that can be stored on the external along with other files, and you can continue using the external drive for any other purposes. The stored image file will be smaller than the size of your existing C: drive because the image includes only in-use sectors and is compressed.

 

That makes sense about the clone vrs backup.

ok..
in the event of a hard disk crash,
I would go into my bios,
change boot to CDrom drive,
put in my true image disk,
boot up and go to restore.

Unless I was to put in a new hard drive then I would go to install new hard drive 1st in the software and let true image walk me thru it and then do the recovery.
Is that right?

 

That is correct.

I've never used the "new disk" wizard so I'm not sure of what it would do. Here's what I would do. After booting your PC with the recovery CD go to "Restore" on the menu and choose to restore the entire disk, using your image file on the external drive as the source and your new internal hard disk as the destination.

As you complete the steps in the "restore" wizard you will be given choices for which partitions to restore and whether to make them the same size or larger/smaller. Ignore these if your new disk is the same size as your old disk; just restore the whole disk and you will end up with an identical copy of what you had before.

Search for posts here by GroverH. He has links to an illustrated guide in his posts that will show you what to do, step-by-step.

 

My current C drive is 80G.
I would be putting in a much larger drive so I'm not sure how much I would partition.

I have a slave drive that is 120 G which is where I keep pixs and video files so I don't think I would need to partition I assume.
someone want to comment on that?

BTW:
to Mudcrab..
took your advise and made a boot disk after I updated the software
since my original install disk was and older much build version.

 

Hello TonyR,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that, as was pointed by k0lo, there are two approaches available:

Clone Disk - migrates/copies the entire contents of one disk drive to another;

Backup - creates a special archive file for backup and disaster recovery purposes;

Please take a look at this FAQ article explaining the difference between Clone Disk and Backup approaches in more detail.

Please notice that you will have an option to set partition size during both restore and cloning operations. The choices are to leave sizes as is, resize proportionally to fill whole destination drive, or set new sizes manually. Please see Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User's Guide for detailed instructions.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov