New drive..need to prepare?

Hello
I need to replace a hard drive with a larger one. The old drive is has the active primary partition on it. It is the only partition on the drive.
I have made an image of the old drive with True Image.
What do I need to do to prepare the drive.
Partition?
Format?
Make Active?
Thanks in advance!

 

OK, these instructions for preparing the new hard drive are very detailed, but if you follow them exactly, the restore will go well.

1. Install the new drive in place of the old one with the same jumper settings.
2. Boot from the Acronis Recovery CD and select Restore.
3. Make any adjustments to the space used on the new drive in TrueImage.
4. Select Active for the partition type on the new drive.
5. Restore your backup.
6. Remove the TI CD and reboot.

One of the great features of image software is that it can restore to "bare metal."

 

The simplest way to replace an existing drive with a new one is to clone the old disk to the new one. You will need to have both disks installed on the system to do this. The procedure can be automatic (manual options are available) and easy to do. You do not need to prepare the new disk in any way. The User Guide on the subject is easy to understand and quite detailed and should be your first point of call. If you don't understand anything, ask before you go ahead.

One of the questions TI will ask is what you want to do with the contents of the old disk. I suggest you leave the old disk intact just in case something goes wrong diring the cloning process. You can always reformat it later when you are completely satisfied that the clone is OK.

The only gotcha with cloning is that you MUST disconnect the old disk BEFORE you reboot your system. If you do not do this, Windows gets very confused and it's a real hassle to fix.

 

Two questions:
1. Of the two cloning or restoring from a full image (which I have on an external Maxtor One touch) which is the safest and most predictable.
2. Assuming I did clone and use the automatic script, will it delete my old drive.
I don't want it to do this if possible.
Thanks in advance

 

1) If your new drive is the same size as the old one you can either restore your image of the old one or clone the old one to the new one.
2) If your new drive is larger than the old one you should clone to the larger one.
3) Cloning offers the choice of whether to delete data from the old (source) drive. Choose NOT to delete the data until after you are sure the new drive works for you.
4) Neither is more or less reliable. There are some technical differences as to how the data is constructed on the new drive. Just be sure to disconnect the old drive before restarting the computer and don't try to run with two identical drives at the same time so as to avoid data corruption.
Good luck.

 

While Bobdat prefers cloning in your situation, I prefer restoring an image.

In particular, you already have the image on an external drive, so you can just follow the steps I outlined easily. There's no worry about rebooting with both drives attached since you will have removed the original drive and have it safely tucked away.

You can adjust the partition size before starting the restore, so you have control over how the new drive gets partitioned.