Clone to an external hard drive

I tried unsuccessfully to clone my 130gb of data to a 750 gb ext hard drive. I have other data on the ext hd. Do I need to create a partition on the ext hd first? Or do I need to buy a hard drive with nothing else on it. What size partition do you recommend for 130gb of data if that is the way to go.

Sorry for the naive newbe question.

BTW I am running acronis 10. Just upgraded to v11 but haven't installed it yet

 

markvideo1,

What are your plans for the new HD? Will it contain your OS? What do you plan to do with the old HD?

 

The 750 gb external drive is used for archiving and backup. I want to clone the 2 x 100gb hard drives on my laptop and replace them with new, larger 2x160 gb hard drives by restoring the data, op system, etc from the cloned backup on the external hd.

Still with me?

 

So you have two HDs in your laptop. Each is 100 GB.

I assume only the first HD has an OS. I'd create an image of this HD, writing the image to a folder on your external HD. I'd just copy all the data from the second HD to another folder on your external HD. Just using Windows Explorer.

After you replace both HDs with the empty 160 GB HDs, boot to the Acronis TI CD and restore the image stored on your external HD to the first HD. Boot to Windows, partition the second HD and copy across the data stored on your external HD to the new second HD.

Is this what you wanted?

 

BrianK is giving you excellent advice, but I'd just like to add one cautionary note. When you clone a drive, you create an exact copy of the entire drive on the entire target drive. If you had suceeded in cloning your internal drive to the 750GB external drive, you would have destroyed the data that was already on that drive.

By making images, you can copy one partition at a time to the external drive. That's what BrianK is describing.

 

what is the procedure for creating an image? By partition are you referring to the partitions that you create within windows disk management? Could I create a new partition on the 750gb drive (say 200gb) and clone the entire 100gb drive with the op system and copy to this newly created partition?

 

markvideo1,

As John mentioned, if you clone to your 750 GB HD, you will wipe all your current data from the drive. For the time being I'd forget the word "clone" and concentrate on "image".

Yes. Partition the second HD to your liking.

How many partitions are on each of your 100 GB HDs? There is no need to create further partitions on your external HD.

See https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=185619#7

GroverH has some nice guides on image/restore. See his links.