From Old PC to New

Using Win XP Home SP2 with one 80GB and one 300GB drive; Acronis TrueImage 8.0 Build 937. The drives are backed up to two external hard drives. I plan to purchase an XP Media Center PC with 250GB and 500GB Seagate drives.

I know I can't restore/clone the program partition from the old to the new PC and will have to reinstall all bazillion programs. Such is life.

My questions ...
I plan to partition the two new drives with the same number of partitions as there are on the current drives, but the new partition sizes will be much larger than the old. My plan is to first create the partitions on the new drives and then restore the data from the external drives to the new partitions.

Using a USB cable, I can also simply copy the files from one PC to the other, but I'm thinking that a restore from an external HD might be faster.

Is there any problem with this approach? Any other relevant advice is appreciated.

Thanks
EdP

 

In your case I would just make individual partition backups instead of cloning the entire hard drive. And just restored each partition seperately on the new hard drives.

The reason is when you clone the entire hard drive, the new restored hard drive will usually end up looking exactly as your old hard drive with the same partition sizes as the source hard drive. You will have to do some repairs on the hard drive to reclaim the unused space.

With partition backups, when you restore it, you can expand each partition to take up all the space in the new hard drive partitions.

 

Thanks for the quick response, jonyjoe.
Let's see if I understand the process.

I'll make individual partition backups from the old HDs. Fine - I figured that's what I would have to do.

Let's say the old partition is 60GB and I want it to be 100GB on the new HD.
After reading the restore section of the manual, I thought I would first create a new empty 100GB partition on the new HD and then restore the 60GB partition to it. But if I understand your post correctly, this procedure would create a new 60GB partition within the empty 100GB partition.

Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks
EdP

 

Hello EdP,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that during cloning process the destination drive is completely erased, so partitions on it don't matter. You can resize the partitions during the cloning process.

You can find the detailed instructions on performing a cloning operation in chapter 7 "Transferring the system to a new disk" of Acronis True Image 8.0 User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Thanks for the reply, Marat. I read that chapter before I posted my question.

I'm trying to transfer data from an old PC to a new one. They have different Operating Systems, different video cards, different memory chips, different everything. If I understand that chapter correctly, cloning the hard drive of the old PC to the new PC will result in the new PC being inoperable.

The more I look at this situation, the more it appears that the best way to do this is to ignore ATI altogether, use a partitioning program to create whatever partitions I want on the new PC, and use a transfer program to transfer non-system data via a USB cable. After a month or so, the transfer should be complete and I can begin reinstalling my programs.

Thanks
EdP