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Failure to image WD Velociraptor 300GB

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I'll be glad to read FAQs and other articles but at the outset, I am not a double-E major and many of the articles I have read already are poorly written, confusing, and overly complicated. I want as simple an explanation as possible and with no steps left out.

Environment: Windows 7 64-bit, WD Velociraptor 300GB, Acronis True Image Home 2011, both drives are currently set for Simple and my current C: drive has no hidden or diagnostic partitions. No RAID. Should be about as simple as it can get.

Situation: Upgrading my boot drive from 150GB to 300GB. The current drive works fine, it's just about out of space. The existing drive is a WD Raptor. I tried Acronis for WD and it did a little better than Acronis True Image Home but ultimately did not boot.

Goal: Image old C: on new C:, reboot, everything works as before.

Result: Never able to boot.

More detail with Acronis True Image Home:

Followed instrux I found on the forums to make a bootable CD with Acronis on it, selected the clone option, Automatic, then as soon as the "copy" message displays, Acronis does one of two things:

a) 3/4 times it freezes, makes no progress.
b) 1/4 times it reported immediate write errors and made no further progress.

After reboot with old C:, did a couple of things:

1) Looked at the new drive in Windows Explorer, appeared unformatted.
2) Went into Disk Manager, formatted the new drive, copied data to it, no errors, worked fine.

My conclusion is the new HDD works fine. I also loaded Windows 7 from DVD and it boots fine. The ultimate workaround will be to do that and reinstall everything but it's worth trying Acronis another time if it's going to work.

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Steve,

You've manage to have a couple of problems that are all unrelated to each other apart form the fact W7 and Acronis are a common factor.

Your booting problem might be due the way in which Windows 7 finds it's booting files, it uses a database called the BCD rather than a text based ini file as XP used to. If the database can't find the booting files where it thinks they ought to be it'll sulk. The first question is, does your W7 install have the 100MB 'System' partition (depending on how W7 was installed on your PC it might or might not), if it does, did you include it in the image you made?

Make sure you select a complete disk when making the image not just the C:\ partition.

If you tried to 'clone' your drive everything should have been copied across and depending on whether you asked it to extend partitions or leave them as they were depends on whether the C:\ partition was extended to cover all space or just take up the space it used to cover.

In either case it is possible that Windows will refuse to boot as the booting files might not be in the same position on the new drive as they were on the old so the BCD will be looking at the wrong disk sectors for it's files, there is also the fact the new drive will have a different ID to that in registry, though that is rarely a problem.

If the problem is due to the BCD, then your answer is to run the W7 install DVD in repair mode (this should be automatic), you might need to run the program and reboot a number of times as W7 repair utility only repairs one problem at a time unlike XP which repaired everything in one pass.

Your other problem with the rescue CD is that it might be having a problem with your hardware as it uses Linux rather than Windows as it's OS.

What I suggest is.

If imaging:

1. Boot windows, give your C\: drive a label (if it doesn't already have one) open up TIH make drive image to external drive.

2. Remove old drive and insert new drive into machine or if S-ata drives just remove the data cable from the old drive

3. Boot from rescue CD and restore image to new drive.

4. Remove CD and reboot.

If cloning:

1. Remove old drive from PC and place it in an external drive case.

2. Install new drive in PC.

3. Boot from rescue CD

4. Select clone drive, decide what you want to do with the extra space on the drive - extend current partitions or leave them as they are. If you leave them as they are, there is a way to extend them later on. Make sure you do not tick the wipe old drive selection, just in case you are still having problems.

You might want to edit your post and transfer this thread to the TIH forum where more Home users will see and be able to respond.

5. Once cloning has finished disconnect the old drive from the PC and reboot.