Newbie Help

Hi all. I have the Acronis True Image 10 and I am going to attempt my first restore on my Dell Inspiron 6000, hopefully without disaster. My hard drive is starting to fail so I have backed up my entire hd to an small external hd, made a boot disk and ordered a new (identical) hard drive. I want to make sure I do it right. I assume I take out the old hd, install the new(blank) hd, plug in the external hard drive via usb, start computer with disk in drive and hopefully Acronis will install and ask if I want to clone external hd to new hd. Am I even close? I was hoping to get away with not installing windows all over again! Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Glenn

 

Couple of things I'd add to that.

First check that your laptop will boot OK from, and that the rescue CD does recognise your external harddrive.

Second, whilst I'd make sure I had full image on the external harddrive - if the new drive is going to be exactly the same size as the old, then you could use the clone option - 'cept I've just realised that'd be dificult with a laptop - back to your method

You will actually need to choose restore from the rescue CD - clone operates directly - hard drive to harddrive - no intermediate image file - which would be fine if you could have both harddrives (current and new) attached at the same time, but being a laptop that is unlikely.

Colin

 

If you "backed up" the entire drive to an external, then presumably you made an Image of the laptop drive and not a Clone.
The restore procedure is to boot with the Rescue CD which has the basic Backup, Recovery (Restore) and Clone features on it. It uses Linux as its OS. If it is an Image on the external you would need to use the Recovery feature, not Clone.

You should boot with the Rescue CD now to make sure it sees your external drive. I think some Dells have some peculiarity that poses problems for the CD. Hopefully yours is not one of them.

Alternatively, if you can install the new drive in the enclosure, and you have the True Image program on the laptop drive, you can use the Clone feature from within Windows to clone directly to the new drive. If successful, you would simply put the new one in place of the old one and you'll be good to go.

Whichever you use, Clone or Backup/Recovery, you would not have to install Windows as whatever was on the old drive will be on the new drive.

 

Hi. Thanks for the help. I tried hooking up the external drive and restarting the laptop with the boot disk to see if it recopnized the external hd. I must have done something wrong because the computer started as normal. Do I need to hit F11 when starting up and will that hurt anything on my current hd and system?
Thanks again for all your help.
Glenn

 

No need for F11 if you have the TI boot disk inserted. Check/change your PCs boot up sequence and make sure the CD/DVD drive is first in the order before your HD. Laptop computers vary considerably so check your documentation on how to do this if you don't already know.

 

Thanks. I booted the disk, ran full version and it found the external drive right away. I appreciate eveyones help!
Glenn

 

You didn't indicate if you are running XP or Vista. Either either way, when you reinstall Windows to the new HDD, the serial number of the HDD will be different. Vista will detect this at some point and deactivate the OS. XP might do that as well, but it's been a very long time since I reinstalled XP on a box, and I don't remember for sure.

Just make sure that you have your Windows Product key available -- if you are forced to reactivate your copy of Windows. You should have that on some material provided by Dell, or it should be on a sticker on the case somewhere.

If not, you can google for and run some utilities that will find and display the product key -- so you can then write it down or copy it to a USB thumb drive.

 

Don't know about Vista but I have restored to different HDs with XP many times and it has never triggered an activation request. Depends on how much and what type of HW has changed.

 

In fact, it would be good to make a small backup of a few files and then us the BootCD to try to restore that backup. This ensures that the BootCD an can see, and offer as choices all of your harddrives when you select a drive as the target for the restore.
That's about as close to a acid test as you can do without actually doing a full disk image backup and restore. Otoh, of course, you can do that final, full fledged acid test if you have a spare disk that you can use as the target for a full disk image restore.

 

Hi all. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted responses to my questions. I upgraded my hd this afternoon in about 45 minutes with no problems. Keep up the good work!
Glenn