Moving entire older HDD contents to newer larger SDD
Hi ,
I would like to thank all in advance. I own a lenovo thinkpad that has a 500 GB HDD. I have purchased a larger 1TB SDD. I have available an external 1TB hard drive (usb). The old HDD has two partitions (windows C and lenovo provided small partition for Lenovo Recovery. I have read a number of how-to's on the web and I am confused as to the best way to proceed. When I am finished, I wish to have a hard drive that contains all of the current information and have the existing "c" drive be partitioned to take advantage of all the new space. I am looking for any and all advice as to the quickest, easiest, and most effective procedures. Again thanks to all in advance.
Mike
Scott,
Thank you for your quick reply. I think I had read the information that you are talking about. You seem to be talking about a restore. If that is the case, I would assume that I would create the backup onto the USB external HD, switch the SDD for the HDD and boot into Acronis Disk. One of the things that is confusing me is that in my reading and in the FAQ section of the Acronis site, it was stated to not do that, but to clone the disk. They advised to switch the hard drives and connect the old one via USB or better yet where the CD is currently. Then boot into the Acronis Disk and choose clone. There were some subtle differences in other techniques I found on the site. They were mostly due to the fact that I am going from a HDD to a SSD. I will take your advice and read the manual more thoroughly. Hopefully, all of the questions will then be answered.
Again, Thanks for your help,
Mike
I dont' know what you read but Cloning is always more risky than making a backup and then restoring not to mention it wastes a lot of space--it takes an entire disk to save one disk image.
General rule, due to some peculiarities of how Windows Iendtifies hdisks, if you are putting a system hardisk image on a hardisk, it's best to have the hardisk in the machine hooked up as it will be when you run it as a system disk.
So, the idea is to put the new hdisk in the machine, boot up the Cd, restore to it, then you should be able to boot up the new hdisk --might need to check BIOS UEFI settings for primary boot disk. You could do the same by cloning but there is always the irreversible error of cloning the blank disk to the old one -- and then you totally screwed. In fact, even if clonging, I'd want to have made a full disk backup before I tried the clone just to be sure I could get back to sqware one if anything went wrong with the cloning (clone wrong direction, power outage, bad pc voodoo, whatever).
Basic steps: If ati is not installed on your machine, I would boot the cd, backup up the entire disk to a target location (spare drive); swap in the new hdrive, boot the cd and restore the image to the new hdisk. If I have to change the pc boot mode from EUFI to legacy to get the cd to boot, that's an inconvenience but shouldn't have any other impact.
IF ati is installed, I'd make the backup from ATI under windows, then swap in the new hdisk, boot the Cd and restore. You can do the same by cloning but just be damn sure you clone in the right direction -- drive letters might be reassigned when using a boot CD so don't rely on the drive letters to identify hdisks.
Worst case, you try it, it doesn't work right and you make a change inthe process and try again. But it sure is confidence building to have a full backup on hand.
Scott,
Thank you for clearing up these matters. I am sure all will go smoothly. I appreciate your help.
Mike
Hi all,
I have worked with ATI to create backup on external HD. Unfortunately, when I boot using Acronis boot image, the external HD is not listed as a location to use for recovery. I detailed the issue here http://forum.acronis.com/forum/89601 . If anyone can help, I would appreciate it.
Mik