Copying Old HDD to New HDD

my old 80gb hdd is failing on me and i plan on buying a 160gb hdd tomorow
i would like to transfer EVERYTHING from the old drive to the new one like an image
Will acronis true image 9 do that?
or does it only back up hdd files to that exact same hdd?

 

That's exactly one of the features of Acronis TI. You just have to use the "clone" feature. It will even "prepare" the new drive. Are both the drives IDE types? The drives do NOT have to be identical.

 

The drive will come with a free set of utilities that will clone the old drive to the new for you.

 

thanks for the info guys
im gonna buy an OEM drive. thats why i was looking for thrid party cloning software
and yes both drives will be IDE

 

some guy posted in this forum that true image will destry partitions.
i have a 70gb and a ~10gb partition on the original drive.
when i clone it to a new drive will the partition be wiped out?

 

Hi, I just bought TI9. I had a Maxtor 40 gig drive that I had some bad blocks that I could not restore. I bought a Western Digital 80 gig and cloned old drive to the new. All went well, then added the 40 gig back as a slave, after reformatting, I guess it reallocated some blocks to replace the bad.

XP Home SP2 on a Dell Demension 8200 Pent IV with 512 ram. Acronis did well by my task, I have no complaints.

 

Hmm, what about SATA drives? Will TI9 also clone them?
Regards,
Bobsen

 

thanks nomad, that gave me confidence in this program
i acutally have a hp pavilion 7965 from '01 with a 80gb samsung sh8004v. i get to use 70gigs of it and the rest is partition as a HP system restore section becuase they cheaped out and didnt want to provide windows reinstall cds.

i just want to know if my system restore partition will be wiped out if i use true image 9

 

All drive makers have free software available for download.

 

Which drive makers are you referring to?

I have never received or found available for download any drive manufacturer-supplied software capable of cloning or imaging for any of the hundreds of drives I have bought and installed.

What have I been missing?

 

Western Digital Data Lifeguard is just one of the many that you have missed.

Xpilot.

 

I don't buy WD drives. Any others?

 

Which drives do you buy ? Have you visited the manufacturers' web sites and looked for their downloadable tools ?

Xpilot.

 

Yes I have. Have you?

I buy Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Samsung. No such cloning or imaging software from any of these sites.

Is WD the exception? Sure sounds like it.

 

Yes I have. In respect of the first two that you mention I have personal experience of them both. Maxblast 4 has the ability to copy ones old drive to a new as does Seagates Disk Wizard. If you have time on your hands I will leave it to you to find out for yourself about the rest.

In fact when copying an old HDD to a new HHD. I do not use any form of cloning at all. I use it as a golden opportunity to test out my backup image stratergy. Take out the old HDD put in the new one,straight out of its package, then restore the latest TI whole drive image to the new drive. No fuss or faffing around it works every time.

Xpilot.

 

I agree. That's an easy way to get up and running provided that you have a good TI image of the entire disk..

 

so how many cds will it take to back up a 80gig drive with about 2 free gigs

 

i found maxblast 4
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...w By Category/Hard Drive Kits/ATA-SATA Family

 

too many, for sure. Like around 80 - 90, using std compression (my 42 GB makes a backup size of 32 GB). Get yourself a 200 or so GB hdd, and when you did the 2nd full backup, you will be at the financial break even, and it will then most likely hold a 3rd full backup free of charge.

I recall some posts where people reported to have had CDs failing while in the midst of restoring (or was it verifying?)... anyway, I couldn't perceive that possibility, may it be as low as whatever, any tempting at all.

Cheers: Othmar

 

Well each to his own I suppose. I have never backed up images to CDs or even DVDs for that matter. It is far more convenient and faster to backup to a HDD. This can be an internal slave drive or an external HDD. I actually use both of these.

Xpilot.

 

If you read your manual or download it from the hp site it should give you in structions to a onetime recovery disk set for systems that did not ship with recovery cd's.
At this point, viewing other posts, certainly would not rely on Ti9, but an earlier version should be reliable.
And as with any cloning/imaging I would create these as an extra insurance. If all else fails, you will at least have an operating factory box. Check in you bios to see if you can make the hidden partition visible. You can also burn a copy of the hidden partiton thru other methods that we won't get into here.
BTW, back in August, HP lost a class lawsuit over the restore cd's, so call them, they are required to give them to you free now, although their ship price may be crazy.

Apparantly, you have missed a lot of very useful software. ALL the drive manufacturers have diagnostic software, with "adding or replacing a hdrive option in it" A few of these have been based on Ontrack's software, which is a very old and well known prog in hdrive circles, going back to the days of DOS and Peter Norton's Disk Doctor. I don't know why you have bought "hundreds of drives", but if this was due to failures, then this diagnostic software could possibly help you. The softwares are easily available on their specific webites and others for download. Maxblast, Datalifeguard, Seatools, etc.

As far as hdrives, all are good bargains on sale currently, with Seagate and WD seeming to be the most reliable for desktops, with very good waranties. There has been an abnormally high rate of premature failures, especially with Maxtor lately. If you images require a lot of space, then a hdrive is a faster economical alternative to optical.

 

I first replied in this thread that I didn't know of any downloads that would specifically enable cloning or imaging. I have now found that some mfr. utilities will allow limited drive copying as long as you have their brand of hard drive installed, which seems appropriate.

Having been a Macintosh dealer/VAR since 1984, my company configured hundreds of drives over the years. For the past year, we have been VAR's for software/hardware PC products in addition to Macs. We have configured about three dozen new hard drives under the PC scenario.

The problem I see with the free manufacturer downloads is that they are always brand and possibly model specific. I prefer using TrueImage for PC drive work because it isn't (as far as we know) hard drive brand-specific so we don't have to maintain a library of manufacturer utilities and learn to use each one's features to accomplish our tasks, sometimes at customer's location.

Thanks, Xpilot, for pointing me to the existence of these manufacturer utilities. But, I'll stick with TI for our purposes for now.

 

Hello rsd,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that the Disk Clone wizard simply moves the entire contents of one disk drive to another and so the partion on the new drive will be wiped out. You cannot clone a disk to a single partition on another one.

You can try to create the image file of your old hard drive with the Create Image wizard and then restore it to the new one. In this case you will save your partition on the new drive.

If you have any other questions please feel free to contact us again. We will certainly try to help you.

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova