Restoring to a brand new disc

I just about to start upgrading my Dell portable disc from 30GB to 60GB and have a couple of questions.

In summary the plan is to
i. Use TI to backup everying to a USB drive
ii. Swap the discs
iii. Boot from the Acronis CD and restore the partitions

However, I have a couple of questions that I can't find answers to:

1. How does TI deal with the new blank, disc that I have just installed - will it format it automatically? Or do I need to format it using the Windows CD first?

2. How will it deal with the diagnostic partition that Dell include on every new machine - I want to make sure that it is copied across and that I can access it exactly as before (eg by powering on with the <Fn> key held down). Is there anything I need to do specifically to ensure that this works.

Thank you

 

TI will automatically format the new hard drive during the restore process.

You may want to take a look a this thread since you're dealing with a Dell computer. It's long, but there's a lot of good information that may help keep you out of trouble (or get you out of trouble).
Dealing with Dell LBA-3, hard drive size changed after cloning, etc. -- Restore on larger hard disk changed disk size

 

Thanks - I was coming to that conclusion already but it is useful to have it confirmed

Yuk! My brain hurts. I am pretty certain that this problems won't apply in my case as the machine in question is a Latitude which I don't think will have this HPA thing (I haven't been able to work this out for certain - can something like Disk Director see it). And is also only about 3 months old, and from what I can gather, Dell have changed the scheme.

 

Yes, I think Dell did make a change on how they setup their partitions. Hopefully, it won't be a problem for you.

I would think DD would be able to see any partitions on the hard drive.

Have you checked in Windows Disk Management? Does it show the other partitions?

 

Well I have had a successful outcome. A few hiccups:

1. Acronis Recovery Manager crashed when trying to access the USB disc on which I had stored the image - see separate post https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=184960

2. Problems with Acronis assuming a US keyboard - this meant I had difficulty entering my NAS box password which includes a # - it was only when I remembered to enter this as Shift + 3 (rather than pressing the key next to the Return key) that I was able to log into my NAS box (see https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=185057 for details). ~ Correct URL added - Menorcaman ~

2. When doing the restore, Recovery manager reported ever increasing restore times when restoring the first partition - eventually reaching 19 hours! As the Progress Bar seemed to be showing much better progress, I decided to ignore this and in fact the restore completed in about an hour or so. But it was disconcerting

3. When restoring the first partition, it reported that my old C drive was being mapped to D and so on. Again I decided to ignore this and fortunately when I booted into Windows, the drives came up correctly (ie C came up as C, etc)

4. I chose the option to restore the disc image rather than partition by partition (the latter option being the one recommended by a number of people). The (not very good) reason being that I felt it more likely that I would get an exact facsimile of my existing disc. My plan was to then adjust the partition sizes using Disc Director. This turned out to be more complicated than I expected - see <url to be supplied>.


However, I eventually ended up with a new disc installed and everything (including the Diagnostic partition) seemingly working OK.

The only other comment I would make is that the documentation is not very clear about how to install onto a brand new disc. I had assumed that one would need to format the disc first before doing the restore and spent some time researching how I might do this (eg using the Windows CD)

In fact, Acronis appears to be able to restore to a completely new disc automatically (presumably it does whatever formatting is required automatically). It would have been nice if that was made explicit somewhere (for those of us who have some limited knowledge of things work)