Complicated Problem

I'll try to make a long story short.

I live in Japan. I bought a Studio laptop from Dell Japan. The OS was Vista HP, Japanese version. I reinstalled Vista in English. No problems there. A few weeks later, I started getting an intermittent error code - the hard drive wasn't being recognized on boot. After a few reboots it works again, but apparently this is a known issue with some new Dells. Dell may have to replace my hard drive.

I am using Acronis to back up all my data regularly onto an external Hard Drive because I don't trust my laptop. However, if Dell replace my internal hard drive, the new one will again be a Japanese version of Vista.

My question is: could I simply use the Acronis TI restore function on the new hard drive to load my old settings? In other words, I get my new hard drive with a Japanese version of Vista, I put in my Recovery Boot Disk and start Acronis, then choose Restore from the backup on the external Hard Drive.

Is Acronis TI usable if my laptop's hard drive needs to be completely replaced?

 

Yes - that's where it really shines. You can do exactly like you said if you have a backup image of your disk stored on an external USB drive. When you get your new internal disk just boot your PC from the Acronis recovery CD and restore the image on the external disk to the internal disk. If you want everything to be exactly like it is now, including any diagnostic and/or recovery partitions, then be sure to make a full disk image before sending your PC in for repair. Restoring a full disk image will first delete everything on the new disk and then replace it with the backup of your current disk.

 

In my experience, if Dell replaces your hard drive, there won't be anything on it at all. Acronis can reload it for you from your image backup.

 

@jaystak
Please test whether your laptop recognizes all devices if you start with the Ti rescue-CD (especially your external hdd).

 

It does. I booted from the CD yesterday to test whether it worked and it was fine. I was able to find the backup on my external drive and I had Acronis validate the backup successfully. I think I'm ready.

Someone told me that with a new computer it is more stable to load programs manually. If it is only the hard drive that is different, is that the case too?

 

If only the hard drive is being replaced and the system was stable, there shouldn't be any problems just doing a restore.

 

Sorry to reopen this thread, but it occurred to me that I could clone my old disk too. Is it possible to clone my disk onto an external HD, then return my defective internal HD, install the new one and put the cloned disk onto the new hard drive?

Should I clone the disk or will a full backup really do the job?

 

Personally, I would do a backup image just to have a backup. Then Clone, if you want.

 

Hello jaystak,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

You should use full drive image not “Clone Disk” option to achieve your purposes. The procedure is the following: create image of the full drive and save it on external drive, create Acronis bootable disc using Media Builder option, swap internal drive with a new one, boot computer using Acronis bootable disc, select backup archive (image) on external drive and restore it.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev