Laptop hard disk upgrade help, please

My Sony VAIO laptop has a 60 gig IDE hard disk that is almost full. I bought a Seagate 120 gig IDE HD to replace it. I plan to put the new HD in a 2 1/2 inch external USB 2.0 enclosure, format it, and use the clone option in TI 9 (updated) to transfer all data to the new drive. After cloning, I will swap the drives and put the new 120 gig drive in the laptop. Does this sound like a workable plan? Any suggestions of possible pitfalls or anything else that I need to be aware of?

When I clone the drive, does it automatically pick up the "C" boot drive letter? I plan to jumper the new drive as master before installing it in my laptop. Win XP Home, 1 gig ram.

Any suggestions or other help is appreciated. TIA

 

That plan should work but you don't need to format the disk first. Cloning will take care of that for you and make it your C drive. Make sure you shutdown before you reboot and disconnect the external drive. Windows does not like two C drives. See this for a discussion of this issue http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm.

 

Thank you for your reply. I was planning to clone the old 60 gig drive to the new 120 gig HD in the USB 2.0 enclosure > shut down > disconnect and remove the cloned drive from the HD enclosure > swap drives > reboot with new cloned drive in the laptop and the USB enclosure disconnected. Is this what you mean? When you say that there is no need to format the new 120 gig drive, do you mean that cloning will format the entire 120 gig drive, or will it only format the same 60 gigs that was on the 60 gig drive that I cloned from?

 

Yes, rebooting with only the new drive is what I meant. Cloning makes an exact copy including the file system so no need to format. During the cloning process you will be able to expand the partition to fill the entire 120GB drive.

 

Sorry, I do not understand "expand the partition to fill the entire 120GB drive". What if I did format the 120GB HD first? It would then be assigned a drive letter other than "C". Then, if I cloned the old drive to it and disconnected the USB enclosure that it is in, installed the 120GB into the laptop, would it retain the previously assigned drive letter and cause a problem, or would it automatically be recognized as the "C" drive, since it is the only boot drive in the computer? The only other drive letters presently in use are the memory stick reader "D:", and the CD ROM "E:". I really do appreciate your help.

 

Formatting the drive first is a waste of time and the drive would have a letter other than C. Once you clone the 60GB drive to the 120GB and remove the old drive the 120GB will become your C drive. If you don't expand the partition to fill the drive you will end up with 60GB of unallocated space on the 120GB drive. I suggest you read the user guide http://download.acronis.com/pdf/TrueImage9.0_ug.en.pdf particularly Chapter 12 which discusses cloning and the options you have. I would also suggest this review which goes into great detail on TI 9.0 Home http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/company/inpress/2006/06-15-1ati.html

 

Will do. Thank you.