How I restored partitions on a larger drive

Here are the steps I used to upgrade my 60 GB SATA internal C drive on my Dell Precision Notebook M65, 4 GB RAM, XP SP3 using Acronis TIH 2009, build 9,809 to my new Western Digital 320 GB SATA internal C drive.

I am not an Informational Technology (IT) professional and my skills are that of an average business person who uses a computer extensively for work.

Maybe this information might help someone. Here is what I remember doing that finally worked:

1. With my original 60 GB drive still installed, navigate to Disk Management [Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management] and write down the order of the partitions shown in my C drive. Grover’s “How to Guides & Miscellaneous” does a good job of explaining the reason this is important.
2. Upgrade Acronis 2009 to the most current version.
3. Install the new 4 GB of RAM (increased from 2 GB that I had).
4. Make a new, full, complete backup with the new 4 GB of RAM installed and with the backup options set to not excluded any files. However, I did not backup the Acronis Secure Zone.
5. Make a new Acronis Rescue Disk after the upgrade to the most current version.
6. Install the new Western Digital 320 GB C drive.
7. Turn on the computer with the Acronis Rescue Disk in the CD drive.
8. Hit F12 as soon as I see the option to change how the Dell computer boots.
9. Select the option to boot from the CD.
10. Select to run Acronis
11. Browse to find my most recent backup I just made.
12. Click Restore.
13. When the Restore Wizard window appears, click “Restore whole disks and partitions.”
14. On the “Select the items to restore” window, click “Partition” in the bar to reorder the list of items shown for the C drive so the order is in the same order seen in Disk Management.
15. Do not click the “Disk” option. Instead click only on first two listed partitions (same order as from Disk Management). Click Next. I read that I could restore only two partitions at a time. I had three partitions to restore an “MBR Track 0,” a small “FAT 16 unlabeled Primary 31.35 MB,” and the main C partition of 55GB.
16. In the Acronis Restore Wizard I followed the prompts and could easily spot the restore Destination — the new C drive disk (Acronis called my new drive Disk 1 and I knew it was the 320 GB drive because Disk 1 was the only listed disk that was near the 320 GB in size. Acronis listed it as “Disk 1 Capacity 298 GB.”
17. I followed the clear Acronis prompts to restore the first two partitions, clicked on Proceed and the restoration of my first two partitions happened instantly.
18. I rebooted the computer from the Acronis Rescue CD again and followed the same steps to get to the backup and to now try to restore the C drive partition. When I clicked on the Destination or “New Location” for the C drive partition, it took several minutes before the screen changed to allow modifications of the other options (Primary, Active, and the resizing of the new C partition to take up the remainder of the space on the new C drive.) I thought that Acronis had frozen because nothing happened for several minutes and I could not Cancel or go back — the computer seemed frozen. But it was just thinking — it took several minutes.
20. When the other options on the Destination window finally appeared (no longer grayed out), I could change the other options. I made the main C partition “Primary and Active.”
19. And on that same options screen, I Resized the C partition from what it had been in my original C drive backup (about 55 GB) to take up virtually all of the unallocated space on the new drive — about 298 GB. All this was easy and clear from the prompts.
20. I clicked proceed and restoration took about an hour.
22. I removed the Acronis CD and rebooted the computer.
23. In the first couple of reboots “MBR Error 3" appeared briefly on a black screen as the computer was starting, but the message only flashed on the screen. I did some Google and Acronis Forum searching and found several posts about what to do to correct or just ignore the MBR Error 3. However, in the third reboot the MBR Error 3 does not seem to be there and I will read the posts and may try to follow them if the MBR Error 3 message reappears.

Of course, I did not follow the above 23 steps the first 12 times I tried to restore my backup to my larger disk. I actually took about 300 steps (most of them wrong, or out of sequence.)

I had read Grover’s fine “How to Guides & Miscellaneous” several times before I began and read several posts about upgrading to a larger C disk and restoring a backup to the larger C drive.

My restoration took me 10 hours of trial and mostly error to learn what worked.

I think I made several mistakes and I pass them along for whatever help they may provide or for laughter from the IT folks. I think it was a mistake to:

1. Not upgrade to the most recent TIH 2009 version. I had read about problems with Acronis and my TIH 2009 backed up OK and all my backups were verified so I thought that it was best to keep what seemed to work — I think this was a mistake. I know that a verified back up does not mean it will work.

2. Install my new 4GB of RAM and try to restore my backups from when the computer had 2 GB of RAM. This may NOT have caused any of the error messages I got each time the C drive failed to restore. The message was “Internal error: failed to allocate index buffer (0x70001)
Tag = xA7795193C91883D1</indent>" module="1" time="1273989555."" but after I made a new backup with the 4GB of RAM installed I no longer had the error message.

3. Use a backup with excluded files. In my backups (prior to making the new backup with the new 4GB RAM installed) there were several files I had listed in the “exclude” screen of the Acronis backup setups. These were *~, *tmp, *tib, *x1*. It could be that upgrading the RAM and trying to use previous backups made with 2GB RAM had no effect on restoring the previous backups made with the 2GB RAM. It was the new backup made without any excluded files that finally got restored successfully to my new large C drive.

4. Fail to wait several minutes in the Restore Wizard after clicking on "New Location" (I think that is the term used on the Restore destination screen) for selecting a destination for the restoration of the main C drive partition. By just waiting, the grayed out options turned to blue and I was able to continue to set the other options for restoring the main C partition and resizing it to take up the remainder of the new disk.

Things I wished I knew:

1. Was it correct to restore the "MBR and Track 0"? I read as much as I could find, but did not understand whether I should or should not have restored it. I did restore it.

2. Whether I needed to erase the new 320GB drive after each of my several unsuccessful partial attempts to restore. Because I could restore the first partition (not the main C drive partition) and could not seem to get the main C drive partition to restore, I thought that the new C drive might need to have that first restored partitions erased before I began to try each restore.

I did read in Grover’s “How to Guides & Miscellaneous” about Acronis erasing partitions when it does a restore, but it was unclear to me if that meant I could have just restored the first partition again (letting it erase that partition before it restored it), or leave it, or whether I should erase the new drive to make sure it was empty for each attempt at a restoration. Not knowing, caused me to erase the new disk just in case.

3. Whether I should make my regular backups without any excluded files — I will ask this question in a separate post.

After working on this upgrade of the C drive and new RAM this past weekend my old little Dell Precision M65 is working just fine. If I had known what to do, the upgrade to the new larger C drive would have taken about an hour.

John
Tampa, Florida