New hard drive - must it be formatted before cloning to it?

Just bought a 250 GB Seagate drive. I simply want to clone the old drive to the new. In order to do this, must I format the new drive before acronis can perform the necessary operations (thus making it viewable in WinXP as a new drive letter)?

TIA

 

I don't clone but no, TI should recognize the unpartitioned and unformatted drive and allow you to clone.

 

Bye!!

 

So he formats the drive and then TI wipes out the partitions and format to do the clone.

 

Bye!!

 

Hi, Howard Kaikow

That is Nonsense.

An Imaging or Clone progarm can not restore to a formatted Partition or HDD, it has to delete the file system on a Partition or HDD because it uses the file system in use within the Image it is to restore, or the file system that is being used on the HDD at the time of the clone.

Take Care,
TheQuest

 

FWIW, I cannot get the cloning to work, and that is why I asked if I should format the new drive before attemtping a cloning procedure.

 

Hi, Howard Kaikow

That so much more Nonsense.

Because Ti could or should I say Would not restore or clone to a formatted.

Take Care.
TheQuest

 

Ugh...I just went into disc management and chose to "initialize" the new disc. Let's see what happens when I try to clone now.....

 

Although TI is not renowned for it's cloning prowess, it will automatically copy all the information, and the format of the current disk, onto your new disk. You do not have to format the new disk. Just make sure that you do not reboot after the operation, with both disks attached, otherwise you will end up with a different drive letter.

If you experience problems then the alternative is to restore an image of the current disk onto your new one.

 

Hi, Wedge1

Waiting......... .


Take Care,
TheQuest

 

Okay, it appears to be working now.

This will take a while guys so I'll call it a night and report back in the evening after work tomorrow.

 

Bye!!

 

Bye!!

 

Hi, Howard Kaikow

The said post are back to back #13 and #14.

Wedge1 is [was] asking about a new unformatted HDD.

Also I still like to how do you expect to restore a full Image with OS, to formatted Partition or HDD.

Take Care,
TheQuest

 

Bye!!

 

Old drive was cloned to new drive with complete success.

For future reference to those with freshly installed drives ....

If Acronis True Image will not "Clone" to the new drive, try the following:
Go into Disc Management, right click the new drive and click "initialize". To get there, go to Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management --> Disc Management.

Hopefully this can be helpful to someone.

Thanks to you guys who offered assistance.

 

After reading the above I looked up inintialization of disk and found the following at this site http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...069a-4a5d-8cad-6be0fdec01091033.mspx?mfr=true

New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk.

Learn something new everyday. (It might be old hat to a lot of you).

 

Based on what I saw in TI documentation I was under the impression that TI had enough smarts to deal with bare-metal. Anyway, if it doesn't work then this a potential fix for the problem.

 

To all:

Gratuitous bashing of other members will not be tolerated. Stick to the topic at hand and limit comments to that subject matter.

Blue

 

Say you have only one PC and the HD fails. So you buy a new disk. Now what? How is one to initialize the new disk? That doesn't make sense. If TI won't restore onto a new hard disk I would like to know, as that just doesn't make sense.

 

Boot with Partition Magic or boot from a floppy.

 

Sure, but most PCs nowdays don't have floppy drives, and my point is that you shouldn't have to purchase another product to do a restore. TI should include whatever is needed to restore a backup image to a new drive, don't you think?

 

Hi, seekforever and Secure1

In Windows Ti does not have the control "Windows" has it.

If the Restore BootCD is used then there is no problem to the Restore or Cloning to a New HDD, no need for any other kind Partition or Disk Management tools.

Also one of the most Powerful Bootable Disk Tool everybody who is using Windows should already have, and that is their "Windows Installation CD".

Take Care,
TheQuest

 

Well, I used the TI boot cd to restore a known-valid image to a new hard disk. When it didn't work I used the Windows XP disk recovery console to run "fixmbr" and "fixboot" and still had no luck. Blank screen on boot up.

All the files were on the new disk, as the restore process seemed to go fine, and I could see the files were there from the XP recovery console.

That said, a Windows XP disk is seldom provided with a new PC (like almost never). I still feel like all the tools should be built into TI that are needed to do a simple restore to new hard disk.

Not sure what the problem is, but I had no luck at all restoring to a new hard disk.