Help!!!! What have I done wrong with Back-up and Recovery?
My father asked me to upgrade hit Toshiba satellite laptop, which is running Windows Vista 64 bit. The reason he has asked me to upgrade his Toshiba laptop is because he has run out of space on his 230 GB hard drive. My father went out and bought a 750 GB hard drive to replace the old hard drive. After wrangling with Norton Ghost 15 for three days with no luck, I bought Acronis True Image Home 2012. After following the directions I thought I was on track. I made a full back up of all partitions and drives. I even did the back up sector by sector along with some other options. Again, I thought I was on track. then comes the recovery. I used the Acronis recovery CD to boot the Laptop and then I chose the recovery from image or disk. I followed all of the directions for the recovery. Everything works fine. I'm able to boot from the new hard drive and everything is as it was before. the only thing, when ever I check the hard drive properties to see how much free space is left on the drive. The drive still says 1.5 GB free of 230 GB. I'm not seeing the 520 GB that should be left over after the 230 GB transfer.
Acronis community, What am I doing wrong? I know this user error problem. This my first time making a image or a full backup of a windows computer. I've made a image of my Mac Pro hard drive. That was so easy and effortless. I though the same would be true for a Windows computer. I hope some one out there can help me out. I really don't want to disappoint my father.
There is a section of the userguide that describes how to restore to a new and larger system drive. You want to do a manual restore so that you can make sure the reserved or hidden partitions are not changed in size or location and let all the extra space be allocated to C: or any other non-hidden, non-reserved partitions.
Basically, unmark the box for track0/mbr, which will then let you locate and size each partition in the backup. Once you have restored the partitons, then restore track0/mbr.
Some laptop makers have their own hidden partitions for certain sorts of recovery and vita and w7 usually have a reserved partition which contains the boot manager (what use to be the ntldr file in xp.
I hope I did this right. was not sure how to find Windows Disk Management graphical view, so I just did what I knew how to do. I hope it can tell you something. Now as I said when ever I did the recovery, the new 750 GB hard drive would look the same as if nothing had change. I also came accroess an artical on the Acronis site about Cloning your Laptop Hard Disk (2931: Cloning Laptop Hard Disk - http://kb.acronis.com/content/2931) I think I might take this approach. What should I do?
To find the Windows Disk management view, right click on the computer icon on your desktop, choose manage, storage, disk management.
Then boot your computer on the recovery CD, and restore one partition at a time, in the same order they were laid out on the previous disk. As Scott highlighted, only resize the C:\system partition or any user partition to take advantage of your bigger size disk.
you don't need to reboot between restores.
Don't attempt to change disk letters. The recovery CD will show you drive/partition letters different from Windows. Do not correct this.
Make sure you mark the right partition active as you restore (use again your printout to ascertain which on was active).
Finally restore the MBR+Track0 and select to restore the disk signature,
To access Windows Disk Management, you can do so in several ways.
1. From the run option, type DISKMGMT.MSC and select the disk management.
Or, Right click on "Mycomputer" icon or start option and choose Disk Management.
This is the type info you are looking for. Note this example has two partitions and I am trying to find out if your disk managment shows one or two partitions. The attachments you included would not show if you did or did not have non-lettered partitions.
If your disk management graphical view shows two partitions, either print out the picture or write down which the information about both partitions and write down which partition is first and which partition is the active partition. You need that info later.
Another thing you can do is to open the Device Manager and look under the Disks devices and use the disk model number to confirm the disk size of the disk installed. If it confirms the size to be 750, then you will need to use the Hitachi tool as per this link to get our disk size properly recognized. This will get your full size back.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/9303#comment-25052
Once you have used the tool to reclaim your disk space,
then repeat the restore of the backup but do the restore by following the procedures listed in item #1 of this link.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618
Let us know your results or questions.