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Installing new hard drive on Windows Vista (32)

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After exchanging my 120 GB hard drive for a 320 GB Western Digital, I have experienced some problems. I think I did things correctly. I imaged my old drive to an external backup and then restored from the Partition of Disk to Restore Screen. I restored in same order as Disk Management indicated for my old drive. After the new drive was installed, a cold boot resulted in extremely slow computer response followed by a complete lockup and a washed out screen. Following a hard shutdown, I get the standard question about restarting in Safe Mode. I choose "Restart normally" and the computer reboots successfully. From that point on, it seems to be OK except that I occasionally get "running short on memory" errors. Problem is consistant. I reinstalled my old drive and everything went back to good and normal. Could this be a MBR & Track 0 problem?

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Hello David,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please make screenshot of the error and attach it to your answer in this thread?

If you are not familiar with making screen shots, please read the below step-by-step instructions.

- Get to the window which you want to make a screen shot of;
- Hit the (Alt+)PrintScreen button on your keyboard;
- Run Paint usually available in Start\Programs\Accessories or another graphics application;
- Choose Paste command in Edit menu;
- Save the result picture in JPEG format being preferable.

We are looking forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.

Thank you.

I cannot send you a screen shot since I reinstalled the old hard drive. However, since posting (Please accept my apology for the delay. We had some family illness.) I have acquired an external HD enclosure and now intend to clone the drive including the C drive and the HP Recovery D Drive. I will keep the recovery partition (D) the same since I have been told that it will not work if the size is changed and expand the C Drive partition to fill the new drive. I would leave D off entirely but I have read that the HP reinstall disks will not work if the D Drive recovery is not there and, in fact, may not work anyway on the new larger drive. Any input you can give me on any of this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Dave

Hello Dave,

Thank you for your response.

I can recommend you to leave the size of this partition as it is. Increasing the size doesn't make any sense. If you completely remove it, you can influence the HP functionality, but you should contact the appropriate HP support stuff concerning this question, they are well-familiar with their products.

I would like to remind you that you can create a new partition using the unallocated space (if you recover or clone the old hard drive onto the new one as it is).  You can do it by means of the internal Disk Management utility (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management).

You can use this new partition as a storage for your data files and folders. 

Thank you.