restoring image to other than boot disk??

I have 2 hard drives (200GB and 160GB), The 200Gig is my windows HD and its going bad
on me (response time getting slower and slower according to HdTach). Its gone from 120MB
to 21.4MB per second.

I have plenty of empty space on both disks.

Question: Can i restore an image from an external HD using a Acronis bootable CD, from the
200GB to the 160GB? If i lose something from the back end, its ok. I really need to get
windows moved from the 200 to the 160.

thank you,
savagcl

 

Yes you can restore to a smaller drive, but I question whether you need to do that ? I have a WD 80gb drive on a standard IDE channel and it gets around 50mbs. I don't know how that drive ever gave you 120mbs. Have you ever DE-FRAG'd that drive ? If you haven't you should. Also not that as you fill a drive, you have to seek further for almost every disk operation. The more the gigibytes that you store the longer its going to take to read them or write them.

Drives that start to die, usually begin the process by making NOISE, or it requires several re-boots to get the system up or after a SCANDISK, you get lots of errors. Todays modern drives use SMART technology where the drive tells windows that it is having problems. You never said you had these type of issues.

My recomendation is do a full SCANDISK and when the drive comes back clean, do a DE-FRAG.

Storage_man

 

Thanks for the info, storage_man.

Both drives are SATA (150MB max Xfer (what a joke)) and both have SMART installed. I
defrag several times a week and backup depending on adds or deletes. I have run SCANDISK but no help there.
Only have 2 games installed (SFP1 and WOV), both are large size. Each one is around
8/9 gig. The next largest is music folder a little larger than 8 gig. Every else is much smaller.

The drive layout (partitions) are C, D, E, F for the 200GB and G, H, I, J for the 160GB. The
BIOS shows both HD's, WinXP Disk Manager shows as 2 HD's.
Something (i need to look it up) shows the HD's as having 1 primary and 7 logical. In
reality, they both are set as having 2 Primary and 3 logicals each, C = primary, D, E, F =
logical and G = primary, H, I, J = logical.

I will try removing the games and music folders, defrag and re-test the HD's.

Suggestions?
thanks again,
savagcl

 

Have you ever cleaned out your Temporary Internet Files folder and the Temp folder?

Also have you ever run a registry cleaner? Have you scanned for spyware?

I agree with what storageman says about how a drive starts to die. Slowness is not usually a symptom of that. Of course, there is always a first time.

 

Yes, I do all those things.
At least weekly (sooner if needed) I will run:
Ad-aware, CCleaner, ClearMRU,CLUP40, dclean, ERUNT, MS AntiSpt, MRUBlaster,
RegSupreme, RegCleaner, Spider, Spybot and I use Perfect Disk for de-fragging. All the
temp files are cleaned bi-weekly.

 

OOOOOOOOOOOkay! Back to your original situation then. The usual scenario is to create the image of C to your external HD, disconnect the C and replace it with the "second" hd - 160Gb in your case, connect the 200Gb as a secondary or slave and restore the image to the 160Gb, which is now your boot drive. And it should boot up just like it did with the 200Gb.

 

Hello savagcl,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

The easiest way to transfer to another drive would be to clone the drive using "Disk Clone" wizard. You will be able to choose the new partition sizes on the target drive if you choose Manual mode of cloning. However, if you need to clone only one partition you may create the image of it and restore it to the new drive.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Ok, that sounds good. Now let me throw some Kentucky windage at you!

I'm taking my PC to my daughters house for her to use. She has 2 IDE drives, one is
250GB and i dont recall the other one's size (but smaller than 250 for sure. I'll be giving
her my system with the 200Gb SATA drive (has the OS on it). I'm sure she will want to
boot from the SATA drive. So -

I want to make a copy of her drives (backup).
Install the SATA drive.
Change the BIOS to have the system "see" the SATA drive first.
Let her install her version of windowsXP to the SATA drive.
Then restore her files to the SATA.
Somehow i have to get rid of her version of WindowsXP on the IDE drive before installing
her windows to the SATA drive?
How do i do all this without losing her files? Can i restore the IDE drive files to the SATA
drive without messing things up?

A puzzle for sure.
savagcl

 

Is it a good idea to give her your system with the 200Gig sata that you say is going bad? Or am I misunderstanding something here?

 

Hello savagcl,

If you want to install Windows you will need to install all the application as well. You cannot transfer them from another drive because registry entries and some other stuff would be missing and the applications won't work properly (or won't work at all). However, it is posible to transfer the data from the image you have using the "Explore Image" function. For example, you may transfer all the documents, pictures, photos, etc. that are inlcuded into the image.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman