Upgrading Laptop HD, also Upgrading Acronis

I'm upgrading my laptop's Fujitsu 7200 RPM IDE 60GB HD with the Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 7200 RPM IDE 100GB drive. I have a 500 GB USB external drive, so I have plenty of backup space. I'm currently on TI 8.0 Build 937. After reading the forum posts on problems with getting the new disk's full image size, I purchased the upgrade to TI 11, Build 8053, which I haven't installed yet. Then, after reading the posts on issues with 11, I'm feeling nervous about the upgrade until 11 has had more time to mature. So my first question is: do I need to upgrade Acronis versions to do the HD upgrade successfully?

Second question concerns the upgrade procedure itself. I'm familiar with backing up and restoring the entire C: drive (single partition) using version 8. My initial plan was to back up the entire existing laptop Drive Image to the external drive, then swap out the old HD and in the new. Then boot from the Acronis Recovery disk and restore the the new HD from the old image. I'm getting that this won't work, but as I'm unfamiliar with the newer Acronis versions (and multiple partitions), the Grover Hatcher post is a little over my head. Can anyone give me a simple method using either TI version? Any help much appreciated.

 

buffman,

What brand is the laptop?

What you propose to do with TI 8 sounds good to me.

 

I bought it from Powernotebooks.com, but it's a rebranded Compal CL56 with a 2Gz Dothan chip and 2 Gig of memory. I use it primarily for digital DJ work using Traktor software and using a PCI Echo Indigo DJ sound card.

I was thinking I could try my original plan, and redo later using TI 11 if that's not satisfactory - since my original HD would still be available and I could write over the new one again. I might be missing some gotchas, however.

 

I just wanted to be sure it wasn't a Dell. Special precautions for a Dell.

I'd do the same as you intend. Restore the image stored on the external HD. What concerns do you have with TI 8?

You mentioned only having one partition. Is that correct?

 

Yes, just one partition. Only concern with TI 8 is that the procedures in the forum for upgrading laptop drives all reference 9 or newer. 8 has been great for me. Concern (with whichever procedure or version) is that the restored image on the 100GB drive will think it only has 60GB, defeating the purpose of the upgrade.

 

If I were doing it I would install Acronis TI 11 and back the whole drive up. Then I would make an Acronis Boot CD. I would then take the backup I just made along with the new hard drive and my boot CD to another computer and restore the new hard drive. Then I would swap out the hard drives in the lap top. If the new Hard drive don't work then you have lost nothing but time, because you can put your old hard drive back. Why take it to another computer, you may ask? The reason is because your new hard drive will be blank until you put a system on it. Your backup will put the system on it and
hopefully it will be identical to the one your are removing. But, why gamble on overwriting your old hard drive untill the new one is proven good.

 

That only happens with Dell laptops that have MediaDirect 2. You are OK.

I'd restore your image to an unpartitioned HD and select "resize drive to fill unallocated space". Or something like that.

 

See page 32 in the TI 8 userguide re "Selecting restored partition size."
On the next page, "Assigning a letter to a partition." Don't assign a drive letter.

Don't worry about the MBR. TI creates one.

 

If that happens, there is an easy fix called the Secure Zone trick.
So I would do this:
Remove the small drive, install the new drive and use the bootable True Image cd for the version you have to restore the backup to the new drive.

 

Thanks to everyone who responded. As it turned out my initial plan with TI 8 worked fine and was much easier than I feared. After creating the backup image on the USB drive, I swapped the hard drives (turns out my old 60Gb drive was a Hitachi, too) and rebooted from the recovery disk. It didn't see the new disk right away, but using the utilities to add a disk found it and set it as a full partition NTSB disk, after I selected the primary vs logical option. Then I recovered to that disk from the USB drive. Maybe because Acronis had added the new disk itself, it asked me what partition size I wanted, defaulting to the full 100GB (actually really 93Gb) volume, even though the .tib file was for 60GB volume. I was a little worried before I rebooted because, during the recovery process, the USB drive was labeled C: and I didn't want a d: windows drive. After the reboot, though, I had a perfect C: drive. I never used "clone disk" during the entire process.

Now I just have to wonder how long to wait before actually upgrading to TI 11, since I've already paid for it.

 

Just wondering why you didn't simply use Migrate Easy, or clone disk from TI 11? Clone is exactly the operation you want for the process of upgrading a notebook drive.

 

Probably didn't have an external case for the second laptop drive, or an adapter to put it in place of the 500 external.

 

Tis true indeed!