Restoring C & D partitions

I've got a full backup to an external drive of my C drive and my D drive (which is my recovery drive). I didn't get disks when I bought my PC. I'm using True Image Home 2009. I've bought a larger hard drive and intend to just restore the full backup to the new drive then swap out the old with the new as master and I think that should work. I'm going to temporarily install the big hard drive in an external enclosure to do all this. I do though want to make sure that I can restore the 'D' recovery drive to the new drive. When I do the restore will it let me restore both at the same time? I've restored before but not two partitions like this. I just don't want to get to some point in the restore process and get stuck for any reason. I'd like to know what will happen before it happens. Any input on how that will work is greatly appreciated.
thanks

 

After you choose the first partition to restore, you will be asked if there are other partitions to restore. Choose yes, and you will be taken back to the window that shows the partitions where you can then choose the other partition.
For each partition you choose you will also get the option to resize the partition, since the target is a larger drive. For the D, recovery, partition there would be no need to make it larger. Keep all of the extra space for the C partition.

 

cowbell:

You should start the restore wizard by first selecting only one of the partitions from your full backup archive. Doing it this way will allow you to choose the desired size of each partition as you set up to restore. As you finish setting up one partition, the wizard will ask if you want to do another. Continue until you have set up both your original C and D partitions and finish by selecting the MBR.

For best results you should install your new, blank hard disk internally and put your old disk aside for safe keeping. Boot from the recovery CD and restore your backup image (on an external drive, I presume) to the new internal disk. This method is the safest way to upgrade to a larger hard disk - if anything goes wrong then you always have your original drive to fall back on.

 

Thanks for the input everyone. One other question. I'll also be using Disk director to format the new drive. When I first format it will it be necessary to create the D partition for the recovery drive or will TI create it when I do the restore?

 

cowbell:

You don't need to create any partitions or format them on your new disk. Just restore your backup archive to a completely blank new disk. In fact, it is better to have the new disk blank so that Windows does not store any information about its partitions in the registry. You will avoid certain kinds of problems if you restore to a blank disk.

 

I'm confused. Can you restore data to a disk that's not formatted? How can the software or the PC see that blank disk? I thought that a drive had to be formatted to be recognized.
Al

 

A blank disk may not show up in Windows as a disk drive but it's there if you look in Disk Management console. TI can recognize the disk and restore to it. Formatting isn't needed. The first thing TI does when doing a restore is to delete the target partition, so if you spent time pre-formatting the partition it would be wasted effort. The format information is restored along with the data from the image file when TI restores a partition.

 

To add what K0lo said, the bare disk has all of the real low-level formatting and structure information done when it comes from the factory. What is referred to as a format is nothing more than the NTFS or FAT32 or whatever file structure and as mentioned, all of this is captured in the image since they are just special files on the disk. For imaging and cloning, TI and other imaging programs work on a disk at a lower level than other applications.

 

Just wanted to thank everyone for the input. I did the restore and it worked just like you all said it would. I used Disk Director for the unallocated space and I'm good to go. Both fantastic products. It was money well spent. I've been an Acronis TI user for years but this is the first time I had done this. Didn' fail me and was very easy to use.
Again thanks all
Al