Create clone on external drive to transfer to new drive

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by amber18, Oct 10, 2005.

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  1. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    I have a very elementary question, which displays my utter ignorance of these matters!
    I wish to replace my current internal hard drive with a larger drive. I have Acronis TI 9 and also Acronis Migrate Easy.
    Can I create an image of my C drive ( it is on one partition of a drive with 4 partitions) on my external USB drive, then transfer that image on to the new drive?
    The other option is to create a clone of my C drive on the external drive-can this be transferred to the new drive?
    As you can see, I am unsure whether to use the "clone" or "image!"
    When I install the new drive, unformatted and unpartitioned, can I boot it with the Acronis boot disc, or do I need to install Windows first-which would of course defeat the purpose of the image/clone.
    I would greatly appreciate your advice, and any detailed instructions which you would be willing to provide.
    Many thanks
     
  2. pasche

    pasche Registered Member

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    You can do the image as you thing.

    1. Make a bootable recovery CD of Acronis.
    2. Make image of the complete disk to the external drive
    3. Mount the new drive into your PC
    4. Boot with rescue disk and recover the whole disk
    The new disk does not need to be formatted or partitioned. Acronis creates them if you tell him to recover the whole disk

    The only problem i would see is, that Acronis "might not see" the external drive. That would be my biggest fear!

    pasche
     
  3. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    Thank you, pasche, for such a prompt reply. Is there an alternative method you could recommend in case the USB drive is "invisible?" I have sucessfully used the external drive for creating , exploring and restoring images, but of course not with a new drive lacking an OS.
     
  4. Chutsman

    Chutsman Registered Member

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    Install the new drive (as it is - no need to format) as a slave or if your secondary ide channel is not being used, as a master on the secondary. Then run the "Clone" drive feature to make the new drive look like the old drive. Remove the old drive and connect the new one in its place (make sure it is set as Master).
     
  5. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    Thank you for the suggestion. The new dive is SATA, the old IDE. I'll just have to be careful with the cabling!
     
  6. Ginman

    Ginman Registered Member

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    Make sure your PC Bios screen recognises the new drive as a hard disk before you try the cloning procedure as otherwise it won't work. I know because I was I finally succeeded in installing my new ATA drive (which is an internal drive that is attached to an external USB 2.0 enclosure) as the new C: drive on my PC. My PC has 2 hard disks on the first IDE channel and a DVD-rom & a CD-RW on the second IDE channel. After numerous attempts in trying to clone the new drive, it succeeded after about 2.5 hours! :D

    The problem I had was that my PC and TI 9 did not see the USB drive whilst outside of win xp and therefore cloning did not work despite the message from TI 9 that said that the procedure was successful! o_O Then I moved the new drive to be the slave drive on the second IDE channel - this did not work either despite the success message from TI 9. :mad: Then I removed my old D drive on the first IDE (as slave) and placed new drive in its place and hey presto, the cloning procedure succeeded at last! I think the messages on TI 9 needs to be fixed up as it gives the user false hopes! Now I am finally happy with a bigger and faster bootable C: drive through sheer trial & error as the manual was of no use in troubleshooting! :D
     
  7. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    Ginman, I do appreciate the benefit of your experience- at least I will have a chance of success by following your advice. The task is going to be more challenging than one would think reading the TI manual! Probably needs at least a long weekend to accomplish.
    Many thanks
    amber18
     
  8. Chutsman

    Chutsman Registered Member

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    Ah! Since the new drive is SATA, then after the cloning process you simply have to disconnect the old drive and the system should automatically boot from the SATA drive. If it doesn't, look in the Bios and check whether you have to have the SATA drive as the first item in the Boot order list.
     
  9. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    That would take a lot of pain out of the process. Thank you.
     
  10. storage_man

    storage_man Registered Member

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    Chutsman

    Amber my have a problem with your suggestion. I don't have a SATA disk, but I do know that Windows XP requires that you supply the SATA drivers at the beginning of installation of a new system. In Ambers case, doing a CLONE of the IDE drive to the SATA drive, will create a system with no SATA drivers since they were never orginally installed in IDE system. I maybe wrong since I never tried this, but if the cloned system doesn't boot, then this could be the problem.

    Have a good day - Storage_man
     
  11. Chutsman

    Chutsman Registered Member

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    You are probably right, but I thought that if the mother board is equipped with SATA that the bios would be ready for it, so-to-speak. Anyway I'm sure Amber will let us know how it goes. :)
     
  12. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    Thank you both for the input. The PC does have SATA capability, so I am relying on the BIOS to pick up and run with the new drive. Have trawled the Dell forums and as far as I can see a SATA drive should be OK, but of course there has been no discussion about used a cloned drive. More anon...........
     
  13. noonie

    noonie Registered Member

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    Put the sata disk in the box with the ide disconnected and do the driver thing and format drive with xp first. Then clone with original config. Sata won't boot on most controllers without drivers.
     
  14. noel

    noel Guest

    If the chipset natively supports SATA, then it'll see the drive OK, otherwise,the drivers will need to be loaded.
    Nvidia nforce 3 and 4 (4 for sure, 3, I think so..) will natively support SATA..but if it's a dell,then most likely it is not NVidia.......
     
  15. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    Definitely not NVidia, but am assured by the Dell tech that there should be no problems in recognition of the SATA drive- for what that's worth, of course!
    Waiting until I have two clear days to tackle the job, just in case.........
     
  16. GPH

    GPH Registered Member

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    Hello all,

    This link may be interessant:
    http://support.packardbell.com/uk/mypc/?PibItemNr=instr_hdd_patasata

    I've a packard bell pc with a SATA drive and wanted to had a new drive to install a non packard bell XP, I've spend a lot of time looking for SATA drivers before discovering that my PC was using SATA drive as ATA drives...
    Done one test, put the brand new SATA drive at the place of the original one and installed my windows XP update for Win98se disk. This has worked with no problem despite my XP update is the very first one (doesn't even contain SP1).

    Hope it will help.

    David
     
  17. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    A very useful link-thank you. It does help clarify the different modes available.
     
  18. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello Amber18,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image.

    Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

    We recommend you to prepare your system with Microsoft system preparation tool (sysprep) prior to cloning or creating the image. This should fix the ldrivers problem. Please read our article concerning this issue.

    We also recommend you to clone the Hard Drive as the fastest way of migrating data.

    If you decide to create/restore an image, we recommend you to take an image of the whole old Hard drive (with the prepared system on it) and then restore it to the new Hard drive.

    Thank you.
    _ _
    Alexander Fedotov
     
  19. amber18

    amber18 Registered Member

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    Thank you for your advice. As it turned out, I decided to do a fresh install of Windows, and used the files and settings transfer wizard, which became corrupted in some way. I was able to explore my image of my old C drive (on an external Maxtor USB drive)and retrieve the favourites and cookies folders, and the huge Windows Address Book, in a few minutes. I am delighted with Acronis True Image 9's ability to select files and folders so easily from an image. In addition, a copy of an important Word document which became corrupted on the new drive was able to be retrieved from the image. Thank you, Acronis!
    amber18
     
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