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Cloning Hard drive questions

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Hi,

I am looking at getting Acronis true image 2015 and want to find out if it is the right product for what i need to do.

I have a sony vaio laptop with a 200gb hard drive. It is 2 physical drives in a raid 0(striped) configuration.

I am not out of disk space and want to upgrade to a 2tb hard drive.

I would like to copy the whole hard drive onto the new hard drive, including all settings,drivers and the operating system.

The laptop has a physical raid controller chip on the motherbord.

What is the best way to go about this. Also would i need to put in 2 hard drives like i currently have or can i have just one hard drive.

How can i keep the different drives i currently have. I have a c drive, d drive and a recovery partition. If going to a 2tb hard drive, how can i do it so e.g. the c drive instead of the 100gb partition it currently has becomes 1.5tb and the d drive becomes 500gb.

Thanks for any help and advice that can be offered.

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The first thing to do is to prepare an Acronis Recovery Medium, once you have purchased the software (you have 30-day money back guarantee).

Boot the computer on the recovery medium, and make sure it sees your RAID 0 setup as a single disk. If not, stop and let us know.
If it does see it right, you can try the following procedure:
- make sure you connect the new 2TB disk to the same disk controller as your RAID 0. On motherboards, you have sometimes a core disk controller, and an auxiliary one. You need to have the 3 disks on the same controller. Sometimes the cables have different colors or the SATA ports have different colors to indicate the difference. Check your manual. If you can't get the 3 disks on the same controller, you will have to use the backup and restore method.
- boot the computer on the recovery medium and clone your RAID to the new 2TB. Choose the manual method so that you can adjust the target size of each partition. Do not change the size of any hidden partition like the system reserved, or other.
- *very important*, after the clone completes, disconnect your previous RAID 0 disks,
- reboot the computer. It should be able to reboot on the new disk.

When using the cloning method, there is a risk of data loss both on the source disk and the destination disk. It is prudent to create a bakcup of the system before attempting to clone.

Hi Pat,

As i have never done this before would it be possible to list each step of what i would need to do.

Also could you explain how i would connect the different hard drives. Currently when i opened up the hard drive case, there are 2 physical drives in a metal enclosure, and is connected to the laptop with 1 wire.

Thanks

What brand and model of laptop and of the enclosure or the individual disks?

The Laptop is a Sony Vaio, and the model number is VGN-AR11S.

I haven't got any of the other parts yet, as i am not sure which parts i would need.

For the enclosure as i have 2 physical hard drives, what sort of enclosure would i need. Also would the drives work in an enclosure as if i put the hard drives in any other laptop they aren't recognised due to being set up with Raid.

As for the new hard drive i would like to get a WD 2TB hard drive but how would i know if it would fit my laptop as it says the drive height is 15mm, and the 1TB hard drives range in height from 7.5mm to 12mm. How would i know which ones would fit.

Hmm, the model is from 2006, and I don't know how easy it will be to find a compatible set up...

You should try Hard Drive Clone software. It helps me to upgrade my system to a bigger drive and it is also compatible with any version. It is awesome and reduces the chances of data loss.