Need help upgrading laptop hard drive!

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by sjagers, Mar 24, 2005.

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  1. sjagers

    sjagers Registered Member

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    I need to swap out existing 60GB HDD in IBM Thinkpad T41 for a new, 80GB HDD. Operating system is Windows XP Professional... and TrueImage 8.0 is installed. I have CDRW drive and have burned a TrueImage Boot CD.

    I have a 160GB Maxtor removeable HDD connected through USB 2.0 hub.

    And I just bought a USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure (2.5 inch) that will be used for the old drive as extra storage later.

    What to do? Put new HDD in the enclosure (USB 2.0) and send image to it... and install it in laptop? Or send image to Maxtor removeable HDD... put new HDD in laptop... and transfer image back to it?

    Existing HDD is NTFS format and I want new HDD to be the same, but am not sure if it's formatted now.

    I've also read about problems with drive letter assignment not ending up as C:\ when using a removeable storage device. Adjusting MBR (Master Boot Record), etc. to fix.

    Can someone please help?
     
  2. MiniMax

    MiniMax Registered Member

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    > Or send image to Maxtor removeable HDD... put new HDD in laptop... and transfer image back to it?

    That is what I would do.

    And I would not worry about drive letters being changed. As the new drive replaces the old one (make sure you get the master/slave/cable-select jumper on the new drive right!) it will be *the* bootable drive - and will always be designated the C: drive.
     
  3. iflyprivate

    iflyprivate Registered Member

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    I completely disagree because the advice may cause your computer to fail to operate properly. Here's why:

    It's bad practice (for many reasons) to create an image of one hard drive and restore it to a different hard drive. We can discuss reasons later......

    Instead, temporarily install your new 80GB drive into the 2.5" enclosure and connect it to the laptop.

    Boot from the TrueImage 8 Rescue CD (create it if you haven't already got it) full version and CLONE your internal 60GB hard drive to the new external (temporary) 80GB hard drive. Select "Automatic" and "Proportional" for the partitions.

    When complete, eject the CD and disconnect the external 80GB hard drive. Shut down and swap out the hard drive mechanisms.

    Boot up with the new 80GB internal hard drive and when you're satisfied everything's the way you want it, mount the old 60GB drive in the 2.5" enclosure, connect it and immediately delete all partitions and re-format it so there is no conflict between drives.

    That should work for you just fine.
     
  4. beenthereb4

    beenthereb4 Registered Member

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    You must tell us these mysterious reasons!!! I can hardly wait!!!!
     
  5. iflyprivate

    iflyprivate Registered Member

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    If you'd been there before, you'd know! :p

    Here's why I know it's a bad practice......

    I have imaged numerous 40GB drives and repeatedly attempted to restore them to different 40GB drives and during approximately two dozen such tries, I experienced a number of disk sector error messages and even when I didn't get these messages, the rebooted drives failed to operate properly. Symptoms included numerous DCOM errors, program hangs, explorer quits, Windows shutting down, very serious system and application errors. The Event Logs were filled with cute little red and white X's.

    Theoretically speaking (sigh) every drive has some bad sectors and no two drive platters are likely to be the same. Therefore, sector 29,352 on the source drive may be bad and have been remapped while the corresponding sector may be good on the destination drive and vice-versa. It has been my experience virtually 100% of the times I have tried to restore an image to a different drive that these sector problems cause the restored image on the destination hard drive to fail to function properly.

    Then, there are concerns about those weird sectors like 1-60 or so where SysPrep kinds of things get temporarily stored which may be unique to the drive mechanism or the hardware configuration, etc.

    And, as Governor Schwarzenegger says, "and all those kinda things".

    I'd really like to hear from Acronis Support on this issue (whether I'm possibly correct as far as using TrueImage is concerned) and also why they also recommend against restoring an image to a different drive.

    Is that enough mystery? I hope you didn't have to wait too long.

    Now, why don't you tell us why it's OKAY to create an image of one drive mechanism and to restore it to a different drive mechanism and also tell us how many times you did it successfully. Successfully=The computer with the restored drive ran properly. :D
     
  6. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    Hi Iflyprivate,

    Your suggestion is certainly a workable one, but I've restored images to different drives, both larger and smaller, than the one the image was made on with no problems. Of course, to guarantee a bootable system after the restore, you want to make an image of the whole drive - all partitions, not just the C drive. As long as you do that, there's no problem. A clone of a drive also copies all the partitions also.

    In short, both ways are fine. Which to use depends on the particular situation and how easy it is to make an image vs connect a second drive.
     
  7. iflyprivate

    iflyprivate Registered Member

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    John, I'm glad it worked for you. However, last night I created an image of a Fujitsu 40GB hard drive and restored it to a 60GB Hitachi hard drive. I got three disk sector error messages from TrueImage and when I booted the laptop it went to blue screen.

    Both of the drives are new and work perfectly otherwise and they pass checkdisk and other drive health diagnostics I used. When I cloned the 40 to the 60 it worked perfectly. Strange? Maybe not. Maybe Ilya can tell us why this happens.

    It sure would be nice to be able to image -> restore to a different drive. It's easier and faster than cloning.
     
  8. beenthereb4

    beenthereb4 Registered Member

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    Restoring an image to a different size hard drive is done every day by thousands of techs. There are, quite simply, no inherent problems such as you describe. I don't doubt your experiences, but they are extremely uncommon. I have personally done it too many times to count.
     
    Last edited: Mar 24, 2005
  9. sjagers

    sjagers Registered Member

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    I like Iflyprivate's suggestion about cloning to the new hard drive through USB and hard drive enclosure.

    Will new HDD be NTFS like old drive after cloning?

    I forgot one thing... there is a "hidden" partition on existing drive (IBM's Predesktop) that contains recovery applications and everything I would need to restore laptop to OEM configuration. Thoughts on keeping this? Or deleting it prior to cloning?

    I'm also wondering if it would any sense to start from scratch with new HDD by reinstalling Windows and all software applications. Although my laptop is not cluttered now (it's not quite 1-year old), this would make everything nice and tidy and organized.
     
  10. iflyprivate

    iflyprivate Registered Member

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