Recommended way to move to larger HDD?

I apologize in advance if my forum search missed any similar queries but I couldn't find any cases close enough to mine to hang my hat on, so here goes:

I have a Dell XPS Gen 2 laptop with an OEM-installed 60GB PATA drive with 2 partitions: (1) NTFS (C) with total physical size of 55.83 GB and (2) FAT 16 with 47.03 MB. I am running Windows XP SP 2.

Goal: to move everything to a new, larger drive (i.e., to replace the old 60 GB internal HDD for a new 100 GB internal HDD). I have an external USB enclosure for the new drive (Apricorn EZ-Upgrade). I also have Acronis TI Workstation 9.1 with Universal Restore. I have read that cloning is not really an option because of the existence of the stupid hidden partitions created for Dell Media Direct, so I suppose I'll have to make an image of the old drive. I don't know if this should influence the way I make the transition, but the laptop in question is also a samba client possessing a workgroup name and user accounts, and has access to shares on a networked Linux workstation.

If cloning is truly not an option for my particular situation, do I need to create an image on the new drive (seated in the external enclosure), swap the old drive for the new one and then boot from the recovery disk? Or am I missing something? If it turns out that my Acronis product CAN deal with the hidden partitions, do I need to prepare my system using sysprep? Or can I skip this step since I'm simply replacing one drive with another, larger capacity drive? Or, is my situation likely to create enough problems that I should just set up the new drive in the enclosure and use it as external storage (although I'd prefer to simply replace the old drive so that everything is self-contained)?

Any advice is much appreciated!

 

sltboss,

My first thought was that you wouldn't have any trouble cloning your 60 GB HD with TI. You actually have 3 partitions on your HD. The HPA one is really hidden. But I don't know what will happen to that HPA containing Dell Media Direct. I think it will be copied to the new HD (I'm guessing) but it certainly won't work anymore without using the Dell ISO CD to fix it. Worth trying anyway.

The alternative is to image the FAT and NTFS partitions and to forget the HPA. How much free space do you have in your C: drive?

Sysprep is not required. It's for restoring images to different hardware.

 

Brian,

Thank you very kindly for the rapid response! I am not too worried about the HPA partition because that is something that, as you point out, can be dealt with after the transition so that can just be left out if I restore from image. In response to your question, I have about 7.5 GB of free space on my internal HDD (thus prompting me to replace it). As far as I can tell, the drive works perfectly well, with no issues whatsoever. Anyhoo, after posting this, I went on a bit of a deeper foray through the TI forum and I see that restoring an image through TI appears to be preferred over cloning in cases similar to mine. I also see that TI will handle the partitioning of the new drive. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any complete step-by-step exposition so I'm still not entirely sure what to do, and in what order to do it. But I doubt I can do much harm since I've got a brand new drive that I can stick in an enclosure.

Roger on the sysprep; I guess the key is not to let Windows know that there are two identical drives.

 

If it was my laptop, I'd try cloning. If it doesn't work then you can delete the partitions and start again with images. Let us know what you would prefer. Cloning is much easier.

 

Hello sltboss,

Hopefully you'll find this <fully illustrated tutorial> useful. Whilst it's written for TI 9.0 Home, most of it can be read across to TI 9.1 Workstation.

Regards

 

Brian - since it is simpler, I would definitely prefer cloning. I will do cloning in manual mode so that I can prevent proportional resizing of the new partitions. Hopefully, the Dell Media situation won't cause the problem that I've heard about whereby a good chunk of physical space is "unusable" on the new drive. Of course, I'll still have the old drive, whose contents I will make sure NOT to destroy in the cloning process. And to be doubly safe, I'll make a fresh full image of the old drive prior to doing the cloning.

Menorcaman: thanks for that link! It looks quite useful and will make usage of the software much less scary. One question (probably dumb): if I go the cloning route, when I swap the old for the new HDD, am I correct in assuming that the drive letter will still be C?

 

Again I'm guessing but I'd expect your HPA to increase from its present 2 GB to 3 GB. Only a loss of 1 GB.

I wish there was an easy way to delete HPAs.

 

Not a dumb question at all. Yes, the new drive will show up as C: Just make sure you disconnect the old drive immediately the clone operation has finished so that when Windows boots up for the first time it doesn't detect two drives with the same DiskID. Once Windows has booted from the new drive and assigned the correct ID you can reconnect the old one and do what you will with it.

Regards

 

Thanks again, Menorcaman! So once the operation is complete, I'll shut down the laptop, install the new HDD in the bracket, set the jumper and pop it in the machine.

On an unrelated question: in my preparations for doing the cloning, I updated my software and attempted to make a bootable rescue media. When I burned to an ISO image, it appeared to be complete (file was about 111 mb large, with all components selected in the dialog box). However, when burning directly to CD, it does not appear to have worked. I have only a single folder "Recovery Manager", containing the following files, sizes and types

bootmenu (1.85 MB) - application
bootwiz (22 KB) - system file
f11 (1 KB) - MS Outlook config file
kernel (650 KB) - DAT file
mouse (5 KB) - MS-DOS App
ram-disk (15.985 MB) - DAT file
splash.run (25 KB) - RUN file

Is that correct or is something going awry with the CD-creation? No errors are showing up in the processing.

 

Hi again sltboss,

That's all you will see. Have you tried booting into TI from the rescue CD?

Regards