advice on restoring to a bigger (higher capacity) HD.

Acronis is great - working exactly as advertised in each of the 3 disaster restore situations I recently had the pleasure to experience.

The above has given me 100% confidence in TI and my ability to recover a HD in the event of a crash.

However the last time I needed to do a restore I hit a small snag. And I want to know what I should do different next time.

Background:
The original HD had three elements to it:
1) a MBR
2) a "hidden" partition of apx 3 gig presumably containing the manufactures initial image of the pc when purchased
3) the "c:\" drive.

I performed regular/scheduled TI backups of this entire HD.

Later when the HD crashed I bought a bigger capacity drive and used Trueimage (v11) and restored all 3 items one restore process.

The good news was the restored HD worked perfectly and booted right into windows as if nothing ever was wrong.
All 3 elements of the original drive are present on the new drive.

The bad news was the "c:\" drive did not have access to the extra capacity of the new HD. All the extra capacity was in an unused/unallocated partition. With time being a consideration I used partition magic to resize/expand the c:\ to consume the unallocated space.

I suspect I did the restore "wrong" and had I done things differently I would have had the effect I wanted. Which is
all three elements restored including the hidden partition with all available capacity of the drive being given to the "c:\" drive.

Hopefully the above is enough to describe the problem and what I might have done wrong and what I should have done to get the desired effect without the need to use partition magic afterward.

 

I happend to stumble upon a posting of groverh
his signature contians a link that promises to address my question. I will check this out.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=203480

 

If you do the restore in three separate steps by checking only the boxes next to the individual items, you will be able to change the size of the partitions. That will allow you to increase the size of the C: partition to use the unallocated space.

To fix this now, you can restore ONLY the C: partition since the drive already has the MBR and hidden partition on it. When you select only C: to restore you will be able to expand C: into the unallocated space. Naturally, when you must restore C: again, you must restore it to the C: partition that already exists on the new drive, but you can then increase it's size.

Let us know how this works.

 

Did much the same thing . . .

The answer in my case was simply to take Partition Magic and increase the size of the C: drive on the new HDD. Try that you might like it.
Then you will have full use of all the space on your new drive.

 

After reading the GroverH document I totally understand.

This evening I have used that document with 100% success and now have proven (by doing it) just how easy it is to accomplish a restore to the desired size without the need to use partition magic afterward.

THANK YOU GroverH and contributors.

 

Thank you for posting. It is comments like yours which makes my time spent worthwhile.

However, do me a favor (and yourself). Take the time to go back and reread the guides again. Don't just skim read. Read them carefully. I believe it will help you to have an even better understanding. Remember, my guides are just than. There are other ways of successfully using TI to perform backups & restores. It depends upon your needs.

If you have some additional times, you may find the links below both interesting and helpful:

Dwalby,
Restore failed. Prior restored succeeded. Lesson learned the hard way (almost)
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=238702

Xpilot backupprocedure using internal disk caddies
Post #7
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1414684&postcount=7

Post #221
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1272558&postcount=221

Tatou rambling --one large drive with many externals
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1383642&postcount=13

Clone or Restore using Resize comparison
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1299861&postcount=9

When/Why do people mount
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=154735

Folder naming when storing backup archive images
Post #6
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=184414&postcount=6
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