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Question on use of Acronis True Image Home 2010

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I have a Dell M1730 notebook setup as follows

1) Samsung SSD 64 gb - 1 partition with Vista 32 bit Home Premium installled. The system boot files also reside on this partition.

2) Seagate Momentus 200 gb - 1 partition with Windows 7 32 bit Home Premium installed- size 48 gb
- 2nd partiiton with data and backups - size 152 gb

My system currently works fine with a dual boot setup for Vista and Win 7. I would like to trash Vista and move my Win 7 installation from the Seagate drive to the Samsung SSD. Can I use Acronis True Image 2010 Home to accomplish this? I have a Windows image backup of both the Vista and Windows 7 partitions that is on the backup parition. Should I use that image backup to restore from or can I clone an active Win 7 partition over the Vista partition. Since my boot files will get wiped out, I assume I will have to use the Win 7 install DVD to repair the boot startup files ?? I will be executing this from the win 7 partition or will I need to boot TI from a DVD if I want to clone Win7 on top of Vista ??

Any advice would be appreciated :)

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Hi Barry, you should be able to do what you want but would be best to not clone your active Windows 7 partition as this will conflict with the existing partition on the 200gb drive if you try to boot with both drives installed once cloned.

I would suggest that you should take a full backup of your Windows 7 partition - that includes the hidden System partition (approx 100mb) too, then do a restore of this on to your SSD drive using the Universal Restore option which allows the backup to be restored to different hardware.

This method should allow you to effectively dual boot Windows 7 partitions so long as you do not allow the hidden System partition to be automatically resized in proportion to the size of the SSD drive, i.e. 64gb versus the 48gb it came from.

An alternative approach would be to do either an upgrade of the Vista partition to 7 using your install DVD, or do a Custom (read = clean) install of 7 on the SSD - the clean / custom install would be the most effective as you wouldn't carry forward any dross from Vista. Both installs of 7 should activate because you are effectively using the same physical hardware in the box, so processor, disk etc will all match. Once everything is working as desired, you can reclaim the 48gb partition where 7 was originally installed. The only gotcha to watch out for is that the second install of 7 does not share any system files with the original install - remove the second disk during the install if possible to ensure this doesn't happen!