Cloning Hard Drive/FAT32 and NTFS question...

I downloaded the trial version of Acronis True Image 10 Home and I just purchased a new 250GB Seagate HDD. My current 40GB Western Digital HDD just wasn't big enough and it's over 4 years old. I still would like to keep this as a backup/storage drive though.

I need to create an image of, or maybe they call it clone the entire contents of the old drive and put the copy of the contents on the new drive. I'm not sure how to do that yet and I had a few questions.

Will this essentially let me go on like I never changed the drive in the first place with all my programs, settings and things like they were on the old drive?

I have heard that NTFS is the way to go when formatting from now on, but my current drive is FAT32. Can I clone the FAT32 drive and just have True Image copy that to an NTFS drive without problems

And my third question is about partitions. I'm not really sure what to do when it comes to this at all. Do I need to create one? If so, what size

I've never really down much with the hardware side of computers as you can probably tell! Any help is much appreciated! Thanks

 

First I would create the bootable CD media from the installed True Image software. You will need this in case your drive ever goes belly up without warning. Next, boot with this Cd and assuming you already have the 250Gb drive installed in the computer, choose the "Add New Drive" from the menu that comes up from the CD. Once this process is done, choose Clone drive from the menu. In this process after you choose the Source and Destination drives, the software will see that there is already a partition that was created during the "Add New Drive" process and will default to deleting it. Procede with this and continue with the Cloning process.

Once the Cloning process is complete, shutdown and disconnect the 40Gb, reboot, quickly remove the CD and the system should boot from the 250Gb. If it doesn't boot from the 250Gb, you may have to either set the 250 as the Master on the Primary controller or rearrange the boot priority in the Bios so that the order is:
Floppy drive (if any)
CDRom
Hdd 0
Hdd 1
Any Other Boot Device

 

Thanks for the reply...

I'm getting ready to make the CD, but what do I do about formatting the new drive I know I need to go do this in Windows but can I choose NTFS even if my old drive is FAT32 Will Acronis work

 

You do not have to format the drive. The "Add New Drive" does that. Don't worry about the type of file system at this point.

 

Great, I'll see what happens and post my results here...

 

Cloning or restoring and image restores the same file system so if you restore a FAT32 partition either by imaging or cloning you get a FAT32 partition. Formatting a partition on the new drive as NTFS does nothing for this because the one of the first things that happens is the deletion of the NTFS partition on the target drive.

You need to convert your existing FAT32 partition to NTFS first (after making a backup of course). MS has a utility called Convert that will do it but it makes 512 byte clusters which is not seen by many as a good size for the sake of efficiency. Programs like Partition Magic and Acronis Disk Director(?) likely allow partition to be converted and use different cluster sizes. I did it with Partition Magic yrs ago.

Other option is to format the disk NTFS and then reinstall your OS and apps. Takes some time but maybe it is time for a cleanup anyway .

 

Hello FordGT,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that the bootable media of the trial version of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home is limited to restore function only. You can either initiate cloning from within Windows, or create an image of your old hard drive and then use Acronis Bootable Rescue Media to restore it to a new drive. In both cases you will be able to resize the partitions during the process to fit your new drive. During the restore procedure it is also possible to change partition file system.
Please notice that it is not necessary to perform any operations on a new hard drive before restoring/cloning to it.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image 10.0 Home in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

According to 6.3.7 in the TI10 User's Guide you can change FAT16 to FAT32 and Ext2 to Ext3 and "for partitions with other native file systems this option is not available". This indicates a FAT32 to NTFS conversion is not possible.

 

Hello everyone,

I'm sorry for misleading you with incomplete information. seekforever is indeed correct, and as the User's Guide indicates only FAT16->FAT32 and Ext2->Ext3 conversions are possible during the restore procedure.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

sorry to dig into an old topic, but if I had a FAT32 partition, made an image with acronis for it, and now I had change it to NTFS I won't be able to restore the image, right?

 

Thats correct. If you restore it you will be back to Fat32. You can convert Fat32 to NTFS http://aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm after the restore. Make another image after the conversion and keep both just in case you need to go back to Fat32.

 

thank you for the answer.

 

Hello pykko,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that the image archive can be restored, but all the data stored on the target partition will be deleted and replaced by the image data, and as thomasjk mentioned the restored partition file system will be the same as the file system of the partition in the image archive (FAT32 in your case).

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

I understand it. I'l restore and make another back up after converting to NTFS.