Simple upgrade of my hard drive

I have an 80GB ide primary and a 120 GB ide secondary drive. Also a DVD burner and a CD burner. I recently replaced the 80 with a SATA 250 and booted with the emergency CD and tried to restore from an archive file from the 120.

TI 9 bld 2302 seemed very keen to restore but it said it wanted to assign a drive letter of F: . I couldn't discourage it from assigning a drive F: so after a 2 hour restore, I tried booting off the 250 SATA but no luck. I added the 80 GB back (removed the 120) and I could access the nicely copied files on the 250 but I could not make it boot Windows XP. I looked at the boot.ini but didn't see anything amiss.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I do also have a 200GB external USB drive and I am busy trying a restore from that with only the 250 SATA drive in the machine. At least it isn't trying to make the 250GB into a drive F:.


I did try some other things which didn't seem to work. I put the 80 GB ide in with the 250GB SATA, booted from the CD and tried cloning the disk. TI said it was working but the progress bar never moved after about 15 minutes. I cancelled out of it and it said it had completed the job successfully. It didn't of course.

I also tried cloning after booting Windows XP. That said it wanted to reboot the system to do it's job but it seemed to get confused as to which drive was drive 1 and which was drive 2. It seemed to try to copy but didn't manage to get a copy. Luckily it didn't copy the blank disk over the good disk...

Phew!
Hopeful someone has some brilliant ideas.
Selwyn

 

Hello Selwyn,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please do the following in order to achieve your goals:

- Revert to the initial state by installing both 80 GB and 120 GB IDE hard drives;

- Prepare your Windows for transferring using Microsoft System Preparation Tool (sysprep) as it is described in this FAQ article;

- Boot your PC from Acronis True Image 9.0 Bootable Rescue CD and create an image of the entire first drive saving it to the second 120 GB disk. By doing this you will ensure that the MBR is included in the image archive.

You can create an image of the entire hard drive by checking the box near the disk name which is usually marked as disk1 (see the respective screen shot in section 4.2 of Acronis True Image 9.0 User's Guide).

- Shut down your PC, unplug the old 80 GB IDE hard drive and install new 250 GB SATA disk;

- Boot your PC from Acronis True Image 9.0 Bootable Rescue CD and restore your image;

- Try to boot as usual;

- If it does not boot then please do the following (depending of the operating system you use):

- Boot the computer from Windows 95/98/ME Startup Disk and run "fdisk /mbr" command;

- Boot the computer from Windows 2000/XP Installation CD and run "fixmbr" command in Recovery Console;

- In case it still does not boot, perform Windows Repair Installation as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Please be aware that your computer might still not boot because of a lack of the appropriate drivers for the SATA controller. I'm afraid that we can not guarantee the successful transferring of your operating system to a different hardware. Actually, no one can guarantee this.

If you have any further questions please feel free to ask.

Thank you.
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Alexey Popov

 

Thanks Alexy,
it turns out that the problem was in my BIOS. I didn't quite understand that you have to enable everything that says SATA in order to boot up. Even the items that say SATA RAID controller. Oh well, live and learn. I was able to get it running fine at about 4 a.m.

It is a bit confusing when TI wants to assign a drive letter other than C:. It did do that in the last restore, but then when I booted up, it showed up as C:.

Thanks again. You have a pretty good product.
Selwyn

 

Hello Selwyn,

I'm glad to hear that you managed to solve the problem.

If you have any further questions please feel free to ask.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov