No prompt for Active Partition

I need a little guidance. Here is my situation.
I have a failing hard drive so I need to restore an image to a new drive.
System has one drive with a single partition
Old drive: one partition 80 gigs
New drive: 120 gigs
I have an image on a usb Maxtor external drive, so here is where I am.
I removed the failing drive and installed the new unpartitioned drive.
I booted to an Acronis 8.0 emergency CD and navigated to my image on the external hard drive. I selected the image to restore from then selected the new 120 gig drive. It is currently restoring to the new drive.
Here is my concern: 1. It never ask me if I wanted this drive to be active. For some reason I was expecting to be prompted for that.
2. I was not given an option to use all the drive or just restore to the original disk size and leave unallocated space since the drive sizes differ.
Will this disk automatically be active since the original drive was?
Can I expect it to partition and format to 120 gigs?

 

When you restore you backup image to your replacement drive just follow the Wizard after booting from your recovery CD. Your new drive will be an exact replica of your old drive with an 80 GB C drive partition and 40 GB unallocated space. Remove the CD and boot into Windows. You will get a message about new hardware and a second boot may be required.
There are several ways to make this space available to extend C to it's full 120GB. The one I use is to create a temporary secure zone using the manage secure zone wizard to use the 40GB. The next step, using the wizard is to delete the secure zone and you will be give the choice to allocate the freed space to your C partition.
I know it sounds a bit odd but it works and only takes a few minutes to perform.

Xpilot

 

Hello jawdoc,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that a hard drive cannot be active (or primary, or logical). Only partitions have these attributes. In case your image was created from a hard drive then all its content will be restored as it was. This means that if your hard drive had one primary active partition then your new hard drive will have the same layout - one primary active partition.

I'm afraid that this will be not possible to restore the image of the entire hard drive with partition resizing.
You can achieve your goal by restoring the image of the entire hard drive (in this case the MBR will be restored too) and after that restore the partition from the image separately once again (this will allow you to increase the size of it).

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko

 

All went well so far. But now I need to claim the unallocated disk space.
Xpilot I like your solution but I have a question for you.
As you said, I have 80 gigs total with ~20 free space and of course 40 unallocated.
When I start the Secure zone wizard it gives me the option to create a zone maximum of 60 gigs which of course is the combination of free space and unallocated space. Do I select the full 60gigs? I would of thought that it would allow me to select only the unallocated space(doesn't seem to separate the two). Once again thanks for your help on this.

I am not sure I understand Acronis supports recommendation for extending the unallocated space. Do you mean restore the image again (took 13 hours) within the Windows GUI?

 

As long as you select at least 40 gb it does not really matter. Then run the secure zone wizard again to delete the zone and use the space for C.
Thirteen Hours !!! for the restore! It sounds as if the drive was running at USB 1 speed. If your machine is capable of USB 2 speed then prepare for your next image restore by making a Bart PE Recovery CD with True Image plug-in. This will let the recovery take place using your native drivers which will run the process a lot faster in future. Details to be found by a search in this group..Mustang's version though unofficial comes with lots of recommendations.

Xpilot.

 

Thanks again xpilot.
I am not sure why the transfer was so slow.
The interface is a usb 2.0 add on card. But I did create a Bart PE disk with the plug in to use next time.
Can I ask you to help me understand the option provided by Acronis Support--

Does that mean that I would have the option to restore to the full disk size if I restore in the Windows GUI?

 

No, anytime the C partition is restored TI must get outside Windows and use the Linux version (which is the same one that is on the recovery CD).

Acronis is saying you can also get your unallocated space assigned to C by this method:

Restore the whole drive's image. This puts the MBR on the disk and restores the partition(s). However, it does not allow the partitions to be resized.

Then take the restored new drive and just restore the C partition image rather than the whole disk. Yes, you are restoring C again but this time TI will permit you to resize the C partition to include the unallocated space. In other words, you cannot resize partitions when restoring the entire disk but you can when restoring individual partitions.

 

Got it now.
Thanks to all for excellent direction on this!