Restoring an Image to a new hard drive

I have an image of my complete C drive that is a WD 80 GD IDE drive. My question is if I decide to add a 500 GB SATA drive and restore the image to this drive and use it as my master drive , will it show the drive as 500 GB or will it still show the 80 GB capacity only?

John

 

This doesn't address exactly your question, but my experience is closely related, so fwiw...

I have a PC with 3 120GB IDE drives, the system being on a 2-drive mirror array on a Promise controller and the third used for backup images. Then I got a new PC with 2 250GB SATA drives and I bought a third identical drive separately. (All 6 drives Western Digital.) I wanted to migrate my old system image onto the new PC.

I tried and failed and succeeded in doing different things. Some of the things I learned:

• Unlike IDE drives, SATAs connect one to a cable. There's no master/slave.
• XP doesn't support drives larger than 137GB. At least SP1 needed. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013/en-us
• The new Promise FastTrak TX4300 controller that I bought to support RAID on the new PC made it run very much slower than with the disks connected directly to the motherboard ports. It was a complete waste because my new PC's motherboard/processor/chipset supports RAID natively with just a download from Intel.

Ultimately I decided I wanted to build the system on the new PC clean and fresh rather that migrate over any potential problems with the old system. I wasn't experiencing any problems, but just on GP. I used an XPSP2 Pro slipstreamed CD and used F6 to add the Intel RAID controller at setup. I use Acronis True Image for the images, and after installing it I could go back and browse my old system image and pull over all my data/document files to the new system. I had to RMA my defective 3rd drive, but having done that the mirror RAID works great and is very fast.

More directly to your question, yes, you can get your old 80GB system to restore onto 500GB. A full 500GB being recognized depends on Windows (at least SP1) rather than the image. The image basically is just a file getting written to a partition. If the destination partition is 500GB the system in the image comes out as running on 500GB.

Hope that helps and doesn't cause you too many problems.

 

Hello John,

A straight whole disk restore would indeed show only 80 GB at first (with the rest as unallocated space), but it can be done so that all 500 GB are allocated at the end.

The method to do it depends on the version/build of TI you have (go to Help>About for that info) and on the final number of partitions you want to create on the 500. The current partitioning and used space(s) on the 80 would be good to know as well.

But there is another problem you may be going to meet, related to switching from IDE to SATA. I think this could be resolved if you first installed the new SATA as a second drive and let Windows recognize it and install SATA drivers. Only then would I create the image of the 80 to be used for restoring onto the 500.

 

BTW, if you add the SATA drive, how do you intend to do it? Does your motherboard have both ATA and SATA ports? Or will you also be adding a SATA controller card?

 

VBArtist,

Thank you for your info. I was aware that SATA drives are only 1 disk per cable and before attempting to restore any image I would add the new SATA drive and drivers, format the drive, and then restore the image to the new partition. Sounds like you encountered quite a few issues, but alas we learn by trial and error. Thanks again for your response, and have a great weekend.

:{)


John

 

My motherboard supports has SATA support built in. So does my power supply.

Thanks for your info.

:{)

John

 

Sounds like you encountered quite a few issues, but alas we learn by trial and error.

Indeed. But that's one of the big advantages of having an image, nothing to be lost except time.

Good luck.