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Cloning Hard Disk to a larger capacity Drive

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Hi All and happy New Year !

I have Acronis TI Home build 6525 on a
Computer running Windows 7 SP1 32 bit.

I currently have a 500Gb Drive and wish to upgrade to a 1Tb or 2Tb drive.

I have read the ATI manual, which advises that the new larger disk should be installed in place, and then the old drive cloned to it from a USB device. I understand this and presume that the ATI boot CD, that I created, should be used for this purpose.

My question regards the following partitions / items :
a) The MBR
b) The small system partition of around 100Mb that Windows 7 needs.
c) The Main Operating System/Programs/Data partition

I understand that I need to clone c) above to the new hard drive.
What about a) and b) ?
Logic tells me that I should not clone these as the then capacity of the new disk will not be recognised.
If I don't clone them, then how will the computer be able to boot from the new drive ?
and recognise the greater capacity ?

Many thanks in advance for any thoughts that you can offer.

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When you clone (not to be confusing with creating a disk and partition backup), everything on the disk will be put on the new disk. Cloning, just like restoring operations, should be done from the Acronis recovery USB/CD.

If you backup (creating a disk image), then you have the options to include the entire disk content (your a, b, c items) or only some of them. Best practice is to include everything in the backup, and then restore selectively if necessary.

For your purpose, a clone operationi should work just fine. Yon don't have to worry about a, b or c. The cloning operation should be smart enough to scale the C:\ partition, but not b).

I would like to clone a basic disk onto a larger drive and I would like the larger drive to be dynamic. Is this possible?

I am not sure. I am not sure why you want a dynamic disk, I personally see only limitations with these. If this is for a RAID setup, I would rather use a hardware raid, so that I can back it up without problem.

Note there are other considerations with dynamic disks in particular with boot disks:
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/354e5163-f388-4354-984c-ea4e420669…

There is an article about dynamic disk support in Acronis, but I don't think it answers your question.
https://kb.acronis.com/content/6533

But anyway, if you still want a dynamic disk, I would first clone, restore the disk to the new bigger disk, and you will end up with a non-dynamic disk. Do the clone operation from the recovery CD. Remember that you shouldn't boot the computer with both the old disk and the new disk in the computer. Boot the computer with the new cloned disk alone and make sure it is working fine.

For security, create a full image of the cloned disk.

Then convert the disk to a dynamic disk.

Make sure you are happy with the result, and try to backup the new disk using the Acronis recovery CD. If the backup succeeds, try to restore a new file. This wll make sure that ATI works OK with your new dynamic disk.