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Moving Files and Operating System to a new drive on the same system

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I hope that this is the correct Forum.

I am running WINXP SP3 and have Acronis installed. My C; drive has serious problems so I re installed windows on an IDE drive(E:) and made a cloned image of E:. The question is when I install the new HDs can I simply copy the cloned image to C: and have it operational, or do I need to install windows first and then move the image file?

Thank for any help

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Frederick,

If your backup is a disk and partition backup (you use the word "clone", which means something different from "backup" in Acronis's world)

If you selected your entire disk (all partitions) when you backed up,

If you can boot your computer on the Acronis recovery CD and access the disk that contains the image,

If the E:\ disk doesn't contain special partitions (this shouldn't be the case since it looks like you did a fresh install of Windows)

Then you just need to put your new disk in the system, boot on the recovery CD and restore the image.

Make sure you don't have the disk E still connected when you reboot afterwards, as Windows doesn't like to have 2 identical disks that are supposed to boot connected at the same time.

If the computer doesn't boot on the new disk, you can use the Windows recovery CD to repair the startup.

Thanks, you have suggested another option. I do know the difference between Cloned and backup images I was simply not clear about the best way to go. Someone said that I could copy the cloned image and then do a repair with the WinXP CD.

If cloning goes wrong, *both* disks might be damaged.

Much less risk trough a backup, swap, restore procedure: the original disk is out of the system.

Having finally gotten the system running I would have to say that your original advice was totally with out merit. It did not work at all. I ended up cloning the the IDE drive to the RAID array and it worked flawlessly.

I am glad it worked.

I am curious knowing what didn't work when you followed my recommended procedure, because this is the same you would do if you had to restore your system from backup...

I am just worried that the restore didn't work for some reason. You'd better make sure you can do a restore...

The backup from the IDE drive would not install in the new C: drive. I have no explanation about why that was but, it kept saying to retry and never worked..