Question about upgrading hard drive

Hi all,

I'm going to be replacing my 250gb hard drive with a 500gb. My plan is to change the drives and use TI to prep the drive and restore a backup.

I've done a number of restores with TI now without problem, so am confident of TI.

Question is, does anyone have any advice, tips, tricks, or pitfalls I should be aware of?

TI 10 build 4942
Dell E510
Windows Vista Ultimate
Seagate 250gb 7200.10

New Drive = Seagate 500gb 7200.11

Thanks for reading,

Larry

 

There is no need to prep the old drive.
You will need a full image of the old drive, preferably on another hard drive. You will also have to decide how the extra space on the new drive should be allocated.

The allocation to existing partitions can be done as part of the restore process by selecting each partition in turn in the restore wizard. Or if you have a disk management tool you could sort it out later. The third way is make a temp secure zone in the unallocated space and then remove it using its management wizard where you will be asked where the newly freed space sholud be allocated.

There are no fatal pitfalls in any of the processes as your original HDD is sitting safe to hand as the ultimate backup.

Xpilot

 

Thanks Xpilot!

I had forgotten that the old drive would intact and ready for reinstallation, but of course it is!

The prep I referred to would be the new drive, and being a simple person I like to keep things simple, so would probably just partition the new drive as one partition.

I have TI set to do automatic backups, full only, twice a week to a second internal hdd, and would of course just do a manual backup just before I swap the disks.

Thanks again,

Larry

 

The "prepping" is done by ATI so any stuff you do to the drive before hand is basically a waste of time.

 

Thanks sheiber, I thought that was the case, but am glad for the clarification!

Larry

 

Can I ask one more question?

I've done some searching/reading posts regarding backup/restore vs cloning when installing a new drive. Fact is, I can't find anything definitive, folks seem to be kind of ambivalent about which method is best.

Does anyone, having experience with both, have a preference? Can you tell me why?

Thank you all for your patience and responses!

Larry

 

Cloning is usually used when one is replacing a small system drive with a larger drive.

Backup (making an Image) is usually for making a backup of a drive in case the drive in use goes belly up. If the drive that you keep your Images on is large enough, you can store more than one Backup (made at various times) on it. Backup has to go through the Recovery process before a drive can be made bootable like the drive from which the Backup was made.

 

Thank you DwnNdrty for your response. It's as close to a recommendation as I've come across, and I appreciate it!

Looks like I need to rethink my plan!

Hope you don't mind my saying, the folks on Wilders are the best!

Larry

 

I get people who say backup imaging is better for installing new drive due to the fact that if you have any bad sectors on your drive, they will be copied over to your new one..

anyone care to translate?

 

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=743864&postcount=5

 

I belivve that's only bad sectors that haven't been marked as BAD and not in use. So if you don't have drdive probs, that's probably not an issue. However, if you do a backup instead of a clone. You have recourse to the image more than once. For example, if something goes wonky with your new drive --say you install Nero and the drive seems iretrievabley misbehaving. You can restore the disk back to its original state by using the original backup file.

I think you can get around the bad sector issue even if you clone, but you have to hop up and down while whistling "I jsut Met a Girl Named Maria" while you do it. I recommend doing the backup because it is more versatile and, in the long run simpler. Opinons differ, as does wisdom ;-)

 

Well that settles it then! I will use backup/restore..........well, unless I clone.

Sorry, just being a smart aleck.

I read the link you posted Grover, and it appears that the resizing trick only works if the old drive is partitioned? Mine is not,I mean it's one partition for the whole drive, but I suppose I could partition it before installing the new drive and then resize it to a single partition on the new drive during the restore?

Actually it makes sense to me that the clone feature would only be there for setting up a new drive, what other use would it have?

Well anyway, I'm getting an education, as usual!

Thanks all for the input, Larry

 

One partition still counts as the drive being partitioned. When you restore, if the new partition is a different size than the original partition, the "marked" bad sectors won't be copied over as bad.

If your old drive has a 230GB partition and the new drive has a 445GB partition, that's a size change. When you restore, just select to resize the 230GB partition to use the entire 500GB drive. If you want to create multiple partitions, one for DATA, for example, then resize the partition to the size you want (so long as it's a different size than the original) and leave the rest unallocated. Then create a DATA partition in the unallocated space using Windows Disk Management or a partitioning program.

 

Thanks MudCrab!

Yes, that is exactly the situation as regards the size of the drives, thank you very much. That did clear up a question for me!

Looks like I'm just about good to go.

Thanks to everyone who posted, Larry