Installing larger Hard drive/clone or backup?

I have 3 drives... 80 gig Main operating system drive C, 120 gig 2nd drive D, & 500 gig external hard drive V.
I want to pull my 80 gig C drive and install a much larger drive 250 gig.

To do this should I clone my whole C drive to my External V and then back to the new installed 250 gig or do I do A full back up, install the new drive and do it the recovery operation way?
and,
either way,
I have installed new hard drives in the past so would I do the normal way or would I put in the recovery disk and go to "add new disk " and let TI do it..
or,
do I have this "install larger hard drive method assbackwards?
thank u...

 

Two options:
1. Use the Clone feature - put the orig. C in place of D. Put the new drive where the C was. Boot with the Rescue CD and use the Clone feature. After the process is done, remove the original before booting the system for the first time. After a successful first boot, you can reconnect any of the drives.
2. Use the Backup followed by the Recovery feature - also with the Rescue CD, make a Backup of the C to the external drive. Remove the C and replace it with the new drive. Use Recovery to restore the Backup to the new drive.

 

So there would be no formating or preping of the new drive before Recovery?

 

AtI will format the partition as it writes.

 

should a main hard drive 200 gigs or over be partitioned
or does it matter?

I keep all my video and pix files on an external 500gig drive...

 

I tried to Restore my 250GB drive backup, on an external drive, to a brand new 500GB drive.

Although the Help file says the Restore will ask if you want to change the size of the partition on the new drive, it never did. Tried several times.

My original backup was from a disc formatted to 232GB. That's what the new drive ended up with. The rest of the space was unallocated.

Vista Disk Management said I could not expand that space, since it was the boot drive. I was just about to buy Disk Director, or Partition Commander, when I decided to Restore my Drive C from an older image file. It worked, but I did it to my older drive. Leaving it alone for now.

 

Here's how to regain the space on the 500Gb drive:
================================
If you have already cloned/restored your drive and just want to regain the missing (unallocated) space proceed as follows:
1. Make the bootable True Image Rescue cd, if you have not already done so.
2. Boot with it and from its main menu choose Manage Acronis Secure Zone.
3. Create an SZ of any size less than the missing unallocated space. Do not accept the default to activate the Startup Recovery Manager.
4. OK back to the main menu.
5. Go right back into the Manage ASZ.
6. Choose to Delete the SZ.
7. When asked what to do with the space, accept the default to append it to the existing partition.
8. Back out to the Main Menu, Exit the process, quickly remove the CD and reboot the system (if it doesn't self reboot).
====================================

 

I am in a similar position and utterly confused as to what to do -)

I intend to move my current C: and E: partitions (the only two that exist) from my 500GB SATA HDD over to a less noisy 2nd HDD and then, hopefully, make this space free with no OS installed (or possibly a dual-boot?) ...

At the moment I am still unsure of what the best method actually is.. i.e to "CLONE" the the entire drive and then rescue-disk-boot and have this image file that will be stored on an external USB drive installed on the 2nd (new) internal HDD.. But this would mean there would be duplicate C: and E:'s there .. and this has me worried about problems.

The process of getting this to then boot would, I imagine .. then require going into the BIOS and having the new drive set as the default HDD boot? -- but is there more required.. such as completely erasing my old C: partition, etc..?

Even if I wanted to install a fresh version (dual-boot) of Vista to the new drive it would prove impossible as my system does not come with a full Vista DVD but only the OEM "Medion Recovery Disc" .. which I presume is little more than a symantec image file that will restore the drive to the state when purchased (OS, apps, etc..)

So any ideas on the best method of moving over my current paritions to the new drive and then getting it to boot, etc.. would be greatly appreciated.

 

Clone would be the quickest way. The only "gotcha" is that before letting the newly cloned drive boot you must disconnect (or remove) the original drive. In the process do not choose to erase the original if that option presents itself. I'm not sure how the cloning in ver. 11 is setup. I'm still using ver 9. Read each dialogue window carefully.

After you get a successful boot with the new drive, you can then reconnect the old drive and format it if that's what you want.