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Basic backup and restore to a larger drive

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I have a dell inspirion e1505 laptop with 50GB hard drive. I bought the system with a dell service contract, so therefore there is a partition in the drive. I am running xp, and have made a complete image of the drive and placed it on an external 500GB drive. I have acronis 9.0 build 3,854.

I have imaged and restored images in the past and it has saved my life.

I have an older Compaq Presario 2811 laptop that I put in a 120GB drive. This cpu has a dead cd/dvd drive. I know the 120GB drive is good.

I took the 120GB drive out of the Compaq, and connected it to the dell via usb interface connector. I could see the 120GB drive. I ran acronis on the dell and had it place the 50GB image on the 120GB drive. Interesting the system requested me to power down to complete the restore, which I did.

I took the 120GB drive off the dell usb port and installed it in the Compaq. I get “PBR 2…done” message and I am stuck.

I want to accomplish 2 things here. I would like to get the 50GB image on the 120GB drive as a minimum. Better yet, I’d like the contents of the 50GB image on the 120GB drive with the ability to use the remaining 70GB.

A step further is I want to get rid of the partition on the 50GB drive. Then place that image on the 120GB drive, and allow use of the remaining 70GB.

I have tried to as concise and to the point as I can. I appreciate your help.

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You cannot take the image of the dell, restore it on the 120GB and put that disk back in the Compag, because these are 2 machines with dissimilar hardware.
What you can do is the following:
- take an image of the 50GB in your dell,
- back it up to an external disk,
- replace the 50GB in the dell by the 120GB
- restore your dell image to the 120GB in the dell using the Acronis recovery CD.
As you do that, you will be able to restore the partitions you want and prepare the 120 GB with partitions if you want.
If this is what you want to do, the process is to restore only the C:\System partition on the 120GB. Just as part of the restore wizard from the CD, you will be able to use a Windows installation CD, or another partition tool to partition your 120GB ahead of time.
When you restore, don't restore the MBR. You will probably have the rebuild the MBR manually with a Windows recovery CD.

The simplest way of achieving what is wanted is to fit the larger drive in the Dell and restore an image of the whole original drive, including the MBR. This should be run from the Version 9 recovery CD.
Then boot into Windows and open Acronis True Image. To bring the unallocated space into use open the "create secure zone wizard" and create the zone from the available space do NOT activate the starup recovery manager. The final step is to run the secure zone wizard to remove the newly created zone. The wizard will ask you where you want the freed up space to be used which I assume would be C partition.
The above method does not need any Microsoft or Dell installation recovery CDs or any third party partitioning tools.