Preparing to clone ?'s

I am preparing to clone my 20 gb notebook hard drive to a new 60 gb notebook drive. The approach I want to take is to install the 60 gb drive into a USB 2.0 external enclosure and use Acronis' clone function to clone and partition the new drive. Then, swap out the drives and put the new, cloned 60 gb drive into my notebook. Is this a sound method that has worked for other people? I just want to make sure I do this right the first time to avoid problems. Thanks in advance for response and advice.

 

Although I had 45 views and no replies, I thought that I would let everybody know how this move turned out (especially since there are so many negative posts). So, here's my setup. I am on a MPC Transport T1000 with an IBM Cascade 20 gb hard drive running Windows XP SP2 and Acronis TrueImage 8 (latest build,796 IIRC). I have been backing this up to an external 160 gb Maxtor hdd every week over a USB 1 connection (takes about 9 hours and another 6 to verify). That has worked for a long time, but I needed more space on the laptop. So, I purchased a 60 gb Seagate Momentus and a cheap USB 2.0 external enclosure. I also bought a cheap USB 2.0 PCMCIA card on ebay. I slapped the seagate into the enclosure, stuck the pcmcia card into the slot, plugged it all in and cloned the 20 gb to the new 60 gb disc. Before cloning I turned off all anti-virus, anti-trojan, and firewall software that might interefere with program permissions. TrueImage rebooted and cloned without incident. I then took the new seagate out of the enclosure and put it in the laptop and it booted up just fine. No problems now after a week. I have also installed SUSE Linux 9.2 as a dual boot set up with the new drive and no problems with TI doing back ups of the partitions (tested by browsing and restoring some folders, and also by testing the boot cd to see if it worked). Basically, TrueImage worked flawlessly on my thrown together system. I am not sure why other people encounter problems with TI, but I was surprised that I had no trouble with my rigged together system (and thakful).

 

Nice one!! Often the best solution is to suck it and see. As the saying goes, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating".

Regards