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Laptop Hard Drive Clone Failure Using DD11

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I have a Dell Laptop computer with a 70 GB hard Drive. The computer is several years old and I am looking to change out to a new larger drive. I have in fact purchased a Western Digital 320 GB Black Scorpion drive. I install the new drive in a BlacX box (to connect 2nd hard drive to laptop) and connect via USB 2.0 cabling. The computer recognizes the new Hard Drive as a 320 GB drive. Next I start Acronis Disk Director 11 and tell it to clone the original drive to the new drive. DD tells me the drive was not initialized, so I tell DD11 to initialize and now the shows drive as a healthy 320 GB drive on DD11.

Then I set up DD11 to clone my C drive, telling DD11 to automatically resize new drive and copy NT signature. DD 11 chugs along fat dumb and happy, until finally complete.

When I remove original drive and replace with new 320 GB drive - error message! This can't be good!So I place original drive back in computer - bootup, and start new drive in BlacX box and viola................. DD11 has now successfully transposed my new 320 GB drive into a 70 GB hard drive which has the added advantage of not being able to boot in normal mode, nor safe mode!

Is there any corrective actions for this? Or just buy new computer with larger drive and scrap out old computer, scrap out new drive, and scrap out DD11?

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Bill,

I'm unclear; the new drive which has the same size partition as the old one, does that one boot or is it only your old drive that will boot?

Assuming for the moment that your new drive won't boot, I suggest trying a reverse clone, that is, put your old drive in the external box and the new drive in the laptop and clone from external to internal. You will need to make the DD11 rescue CD to do this and boot from it.

If the problem is that you just need to extend the 70GB partition on the new drive so that it is 320GB that is easy to do.

How old is the laptop, are you sure it will recognise a 320GB drive? It probably will, but you should check in the BIOS and see if the drive is being reported correctly.