Clone c drive

I'm a neebie to this software TI 10 and am trying to enlarge my c drive with another larger drive and clone the current drive onto the new larger drive.

Current drive: Seagate 40gig. New drive: Maxtor 500gig. When I go through the software, no matter what setting I use, the clone of the original drive is always exactly the same size on the new drive (37gigs) with a large 426 gigs "Unallocated".

When I switch the new drive to the physical location of the old c drive everything boots up exactly the same, but the new c drive - which is 500gigs is showing up as only 37 gigs - the size of the old drive.

Now, I know this is a partitioning thing, but no settings will allow me to change the partition size when I clone. I've done, Automatic and Manual with "Relayout" and the sliders will merely move the 37gig partition back and forth on the large 500 gig drive leaving an area either before or after. I also cannot input the numbers for the new partition numerically... they revert to the original partition's 37gigs as soon as I hit "Enter".

I'm stumped. I thought this was supposed to make it easy to take an existing drive that was out of space and clone it to a larger drive so the c drive got the expanded space? If it just partitions itself on a new drive and I have to partition out the drive, I see no advantage other than the physical limitations of the computer housing.

Yes, btw, I do tell the software to erase any existing partitions on the new drive.

This can't be this difficult. Is it me?

Thanks in advance
Mark

 

No, it's not you ... it's a common problem. Fortunately there's an easy fix. Since you've already done the clone and just want to add the unallocated to the rest of the partition, procede as follows:
1. Make the bootable True Image cd.
2. Boot with it and choose "Manage Acronis Secure Zone".
3. Make a SZ of any size less than the unallocated space.
4. OK out to the menu.
5. Go right back into Manage the SZ.
6. Choose to delete the SZ and agree to add the space to the existing partition.
7. Remove the cd and reboot.

 

So I went ahead and purchased the full version of TI10 and Disk Director. When I try to merge the two partitions it fails and give me an error message and says NOPE or something to that effect.

This is such an easy request and it is SO difficult. On the surface it appears as though it should work... the software says it will but no way jose.

 

If you have partitioning software, after you restore your clone, just enlarge (or merge) your 37gb partition into the unallocated space. It's fairly easy, I do it all the time with good results.
Unfortunately this program "true image" works good at recovery and backup, but there are some situation's where you might need other utility's to complete your restoration. The way I look at it, as long as you got your new 500gb hard drive to bootup, your doing ok, the partitioning problem,though annoying,is easily fixed.

Something that you might try, is doing a image (instead of a clone) of your c: drive, and restore that to your 500gb hard drive. All I do is image backups and when I restore them, there is a slider box on top that will allow me to enlarge the image to take up the entire new drive. Maybe it will work for you that way. Your image will be bootable, mine always are.

 

Mark:

If you have Acronis Disk Director, you don't want to MERGE the C partition and the unallocated space, you want to RESIZE the C partition to fill all of the space on the disk.

Start DD10, choose Manual mode, right-click on your C partition and choose "Resize". Drag the slider or type entries in the size boxes so that your C partition has 0 bytes before, 0 bytes after and is the maximum size possible. Click on the checkered flag to commit. Windows will need to shut down and you will reboot into the Linux-based recovery environment to complete the resize operation.

Personally I prefer to run Disk Director outside of Windows for best results. Use TrueImage or Disk Director to create bootable media (a CD or a USB flash drive) containing the recovery mode versions of both programs. Reboot your machine into the recovery environment and perform the resize operation from there. This is the most foolproof way to do this and should work out fine for you.

 

From the bootable CD I tried the "resize" but the old partition on the new drive merely slides, it won't let me enlarge. I've tried creating a SZ and then deleting and incorporating the SZ back into the c partition and I can hit "Next" a thousand times and it doesn't do anything. Only way out is to cancel.

Then the new drive wouldn't boot past the wallpaper (no icons, etc.)

I guess I'll try the Image and restore and see what happens. The Acrapus, er I mean Acronis website sure makes ya think it's gonna work... but I've been at it for a full day and still got nada. I could have just done a fresh install of windows and reloaded all my software... but having to do all the friggin' updates is a pain.

 

Mark:

For a resize, there are two "handles" on the graphic image of the partition. If you position your cursor over the middle of the graphic and grab you are "sliding" the contents of the partition within the available space. If you position the cursor all the way to the right end of the graphic you should be able to grab the correct slider that will let you enlarge the partition. Or you can just type a "0" in the "Unallocated space after" box.

 

I've tried EXACTLY what you're showing. I even get two vertical lines (not the four way arrow) and it will not resize. If I put in numeric values manually, when I hit enter, they reset to the original 37gig size.

 

Something isn't right then. Could you post a screen shot of the dialog box you see when resizing, similar to the one in my previous post? Also, please post a picture of your disk layout as seen in Disk Director, similar to the one in this post:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=170679

 

wildhorsesfilm,

It may also help if you posted your computer's specifications. Brand, model, CPU, RAM, motherboard brand/model (if known), IDE/SATA drives, etc.

Are you sure your computer can support a 500GB drive? Perhaps a BIOS update is needed. Does the 500GB drive show up correctly in the computer's BIOS?

 

It's a Dell 8500 Don't know the Motherboard.
The C drive is a Seagate 40 gig and the new drive is a 500 gig Maxtor. Yes the computer sees the new drive and it's full 465 gigs usable.

Windows XP Home Edition service pack 2, Intel Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz

I've made an Image of my C drive but now I realized I put it on the new drive and that seems to make a restore difficult or impossible since it's on the same drive. So I guess I'll make an image of the drive to yet another drive and restore that to the new drive.

I dunno. This saga started out to be an easy upgrade and it's turned into another intensive Windows fiasco. I have 4 macs (and no I'm not a mac-nut)... but I must admit, I spend 0 time upgrading and screwing around with the operating system. Don't get me wrong macs can be a pain because they're SO simple...and probably wouldnt attempt a HDD upgrade on my macs.

But the Acronis site REALLY made this look simple and painless (hyperbole). I should have know if it involved Windows it was gonna hurt.

 

Have you tried the "create/delete Secure Zone" trick?

 

Here what the TI10 screen looks like now. I've reformated the new drive as d so I could copy an image of my old c drive to it....

Yes, I have tried the SZ and delete SZ trick.

 

Oh yeah,

The FAT 16 thing, I believe is a Dell phenom. When I clone or image I don't include it. I think it's a Dell recovery segment... or it's the guys in black helicopters watching all of us.....

 

I tried that, but the entire yellow part moved... even when I had the vertical upright bar. If I put the numbers in manually - as soon as I hit enter they would revert to 37 gigs. The partition size remained at 37 gig and merely changed the amount of unallocated space before and after.

 

You won't need to create an image of the D drive to save the image that's stored on it; just copy the .tib file to another drive.

Your 500 GB drive has only a logical partition on it, so you have a couple of choices from here. Since you have DiskDirector (DD), I would start by using it to create a primary, active NTFS partition that fills the entire drive. You can do this with the Windows version of the program. See if that operation succeeds. If not, you must sort this out before going any further because it either suggests a BIOS issue or a driver issue with TI and DD.

After getting the drive prepared this way, restore the image of your C drive only. While doing the restore, don't choose to restore the entire disk and don't restore Track 0 and MBR; just restore the C partition. You should eventually see a dialog that allows you to resize, so choose to expand to fill the entire partition.

After completing the restore, DO NOT reboot the machine with both drives attached. Shut down and disconnect the old drive first, then reboot with only the new drive attached. If you let Windows see two drives with the same OS and the same disk ID it will get confused.

Let us know how this works out.

 

Well, after two days of screwing around with this I finally got the "Manage SZ" trick to work. (Thank you dwnNdrty et al)

I found a thread on the Wilders Security site that mentioned the same problems I was having and it suggested doing a Chkdsk on the old c drive. I did that and was flashed a mountain of disk errors (That it fixed). Now I've been running all the Norton crud to fix my disks etc... hummmm

Anyway, making a SZ and then deleting it got my new drive repartitioned to 500 gig (or so). I made a new image of the original c drive after the chkdsk fix and used that to image with.

So far the only fatality seems to be my old IE inbox which I found on the original c drive (and not the newly imaged drive - odd). I reloaded my old inbox and I'm up and running.

It will be interesting to see what else is wanky, but the old Inbox may have been full of disk errors that originally kept this whole thing from working. I still couldn't manually resize the partitions btw. I used the boot disk to fix from...

So in summation: It took Linux and DOS to fix Windows XP. Great work Mr. Gates.

 

Ah, the old chkdsk trick <slaps forehead> . Yes it's always a good idea to run chkdsk occasionally on your drives and some users here advocate always before making an Image or Cloning a drive. Glad the SZ trick worked.

 

<slaps head too>

Actually, Acronis programmed this in as a safety feature. They will deliberately refuse to resize a partition containing bad blocks because if you do you risk massive data loss.

However, the program responds to this situation by shrugging its shoulders. It would be REALLY informative if, after detecting that a disk has bad blocks, they popped up a dialog box saying exactly that.

 

Yeah, one would think by iteration 10.0 Acronis would pick that up... but mine must be the exception rather than the rule. At least you guys here solved the problem.

Forums I have found, get the greatest brain talent around. A company could do well to snoop these forums and see what their software is and is not doing in the real world.

Thanks to all that helped solve this!!! You guys rock.

I'd give yall a hug if I could....and I don't even hug my wife!

 

I have received a message from DD when attempting to resize a partition with bad sectors. In my case the bad sectors were already marked. Perhaps here the case was corrupted file entries (fixed by chkdsk). Maybe DD sees this and refuses to do anything since the structure doesn't make sense. In any case, an informative message would have been a great help.