Hard drive failure

My hard drive failed on me last night. Luckily I did an image only a couple of days ago. I've ordered a new drive and when it arrives this is what I'm planning to do:

Clone my second drive (which is my old primary drive with the xp operating system on it - it reflects my system as it was when I got a new drive, the one which has just failed, a couple of years ago) to the new drive.
Swap the drives over and use the image above to update the new drive.

Is this the most efficient way of getting back to where I was? Any comments/suggestions gratefully received. When cloning, is there any need to format the new drive or do you just let ATI do its thing - I can't remember what I did last time!

I'm using ATI 9.

 

If you have a full drive image that is not on the failed drive you can leave out the cloning business completely.

Replace the old drive with the new one. Boot from the recovery CD and restore to the new drive. make sure you have ticked the whole disk box unless you are going to re-size your partitions. If that is the case select each partition in turn re-sizing as you go. Make sure you have selected all the partitions and the MBR. Press proceed and the job is done.

Xpilot

 

Thanks Xpilot.

Will the new drive boot automatically from the CD without an operating system?

 

Provided your Bios is set to boot from a CD first the answer is yes.

Xpilot

 

Many thanks. I'll report back if this doesn't work for me!

 

Hello Jobshoppe,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

When you transfer a system to a hard drive that is larger or smaller than the original one, Acronis True Image allows you to create a new partition layout to fit the hard disk of a larger or smaller size.

At the Partition or Disk to Restore step of Restore Data Wizard do not select an entire disk. Select a single partition and follow through the wizard. You will get a Restored Partition Size option, which you can adjust.

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee

 

Worked like a charm! Very pleased. One thing is, it took 2 hours 40m to restore from an external drive (USB 2.0) to the new drive, 250gb (same as the old one), 75 gb used space. Does that sound right or is it a tad long?

 

Maybe a bit long but I'd say within the specs when using the Linux recovery environment and USB. The main thing is that it worked!!!

 

Yes, a bit long. Usually the estimate is 1 to 1.5min/Gb of used space.

 

Thanks - agree success is the key thing!