Migrating to a new hard drive advise please

Defintely make a backup instead of cloning. With cloning you get only one image copy. With backups you can have as many as can fit and it's safer to have more backups than less, generally speaking.

You can't restore form the same drive you are restoring to. YOu could, conceivably make a backup of the system drive onto your spare drive, then copy the backup onto empty space on C, then turn off PC, swaps the drives, the n boot with the bootcd and resore the backup to the spare drive that is now in the sysdrive position on the pc. But if the C drive is acting up, I'd want to involve it inthe backup-restore process as little as possible.

I recommend that you do get a third drive, say, an external usb drive; you can pic them up really cheaply. For the convencince it offers plus the increased backup capacity, it'll be the best money you ever spent on PC hardware. I recetnly picked up a pocketsized 1TB drive for a hundred bucks.

With a thrid drive on hand, put all your backups from your second drive onto the new (3rd) drive. backup the system drive (the one you need to replace) to the new (3rd) drive.

turn off pc, swap out the bad drive with the one you want to replace it with. restore the system drive backup to the new drive by booting up with the bootCD.

If at this point, the restore fails --e.g., the bootcd can't find all your installed drives, you put your original sys drive back and be no worse for the wear. But if you're using a newer version of ATI, this is not likely to happen -- if does, come back here.

Remember the bootcd won't necessarily assign the same drive letters to drives so use the drive size and model number to differentiate harddrives!

If restoring to diff size drive, then follow grover's stuff on how to do that--it';s pretty straightforward; I've done it lots of times.

I'd recommend reading Grover's Guide http://forum.acronis.com/forum/3426 Section 2 C&D and Section 7 A,B&C.

Thank you for your suggestions Scott. I realize that it would make this whole process much easier if I had a 3rd HDD. However, I can't afford to buy a 3rd drive right now. So, given that I only have 2 drives, how should I proceed?

You mention, making a back up to the new drive and then copying it back to the old drive. Can't I just save a backup directly to the old drive and then restore it to the new one? Or it doesn't work this way? I tried copying a backup once and it took over 2 hours, plus I'm concerned about data integrity while copying it.
Which version of ATI do you recommend? I only have ATIH 2010 build 6053.

Thank you thomasjk. I have already read Grover's guides. But I'm still not sure what to do since his recommended method involves 3 HDDs and I only have 2.

I have a question though. TI manuals mention that during cloning the original drive is only read and no changes to it are made. So wouldn't it be safer and easier for me to just clone the old (bad) drive to the new? Or is there any chance that the information on the original drive can get corrupted during the cloning process?

If I were you, I'd make a backup of the entire harddisk. You can't back up a disk onto itself and you can't restore a backup onto the same drive that holds the backup file -- so you'll have to backup to your 2nd drive. Then copy the bckup file to the 1st drive. Then power off, swap the drove positions and boot up form the Bootcd and restore the backup file, that now resides on the 1st drive, to the 2nd drive. When you restore, what is on the target dirve is overwritten so if there's stuff on the 2nd drive you want to keep, copy it a safe place beforer you do the restore.

I agree with Scott. The backup and then restore method, at least for me, is preferred. Perhaps you could borrow an external hard drive from a friend.

Thanks guys! I'll see if I could borrow external HDD from some friends.

Mia wrote:

Or is there any chance that the information on the original drive can get corrupted during the cloning process?

In theory, there should be no risk as the disk is only read. In practice, however, there has been far too many postings of something going wrong during the process. Sometimes it is the operator choosing the wrong disk and cloning the blank onto the master; other times, the power fails during the process; at other times, the computer freezes and the the drive is lost. Simply stated, why take the risk of cloning when it takes on a few minutes longer to do the restore and the master disk is not even connected.

Be sure when you do you backup which will be used for the restore that you select the disk option so all partitions also become checked so everything on the disk is included in the backup.

OK, I understand now and will try to beg, borrow or steal:)) a 3rd drive. Thank you Grover!
Your guides are a lifesaver!!! I don't know why Acronis can't put this kind of succinct step-by-step info in their manual. At almost 200 pages long - it's just too long and too confusing for an average consumer to figure out what one actually needs to do.

Since your OS has already seen the Samsung disk, it has assigned it a drive letter in the registry that it associates when it sees that partition again. When you try to boot an OS from that partition I believe it causes problems because the letter associated with the boot partition in the registry is not C:, but something else. Even if your system assigns the letter C: to the new system partition at boot time (as it should) there are still remnants in the registry which reference the older partition letter. So if you restore the OS partition to the Samsung disk I think you will encounter this problem. There are several threads on this forum regarding this topic, the key is to not let the OS see a partition that will later hold the system image, but I think its already too late for that. What you want to do is save the system image before seeing the new drive, put the new drive in the boot position, and restore the image while creating the partition in the process. Maybe this is all covered in Grover's description, sorry if I'm repeating things here but I'm not sure what's in that guide. Hopefully someone else here can explain it a bit better or offer a fix to that particular problem. I think the boot process hangs partway as a result.

I think Walby's suggestion, as his cautions indidcatem, is going to b a bit more complicated than you are comfortable with. I think you will be safer doing a whole disk backup and restore. Best to keep it simple as possible.

Thanks Doug and Scott.
If I do a whole disk backup and restore will I still encounter the problem due to the fact that my OS has already seen the new drive as mentioned by Doug?
Does it help at all to format the drive?

It doesn't help to format the target drive for a disk restore. ATI will take care fo the format as it goes. That's why, if it's a diff size drive than the one you are restoring from, you have to tell ATI (see grover's on this).

YOu shouldn't have any prob if the old drive is not connected when you first boot up after restore. If yu made lots of other hardware changes, then win might ask for reactivation -- that's not a big deal, jsut tell them you changed hard drives. Unless you tell them you stole the program or are installing it on more than one computer or a diff computer (if it's an oem version of Win) then they have to let you activate.