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Upgrade hard disk in laptop by cloning old disk

Thread needs solution

I want to upgrade to a higher capacity disk in my laptop. The advice given by Acronis is to attach the old disk to the USB drive. But I do not have anyway to connect the old drive to the USB drive.

I tried backing up the old disk to a USB disk drive and then using recovery to install the new drive. This does not work, or if it does I am doing something wrong. It certainly didn't work the way the Acronis tech said it would.

I want to be able to clone the old hard drive so that I do not loose applications that I no longer have disks for. I tried cloning the old laptop drive to a USB disk drive, but this would not work either.

Does anyone have suggestions?

Thanks,
John B.

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You should be able to use a backup + restore.

- with your OLD disk in the computer, boot on the recovery CD and create a disk and partition backup include ALL the partitions on the old disk,
- once the backup has completed, validate it,
- remove the OLD disk, put the new disk,
- boot on the recovery CD,
- click on tools, add new disk, select your NEW disk, click OK, do not create a new partition (delete the one ATI is proposing before finishing the add new disk wizard)
- choose restore, select your backup. Restore each partition in the same order it was on the old disk, do not resize any partition except C:\system. Do not rename any partition. When you restore the partition that was active on the old disk, make sure you mark the restored partition primare active. After the last partition, restore the MBR+Track0 and the disk signature.
That's it.

Let us know if your disk is using encryption of any type, that wouldn't work.

Am I right, that the cloning isn't needed? Am I right, that the backup of the old disk should be copied to an external USB drive? (I really don't want to waste much time, that's why I ask in advance ... I need time to solve problems, and I hope TI will help me here)

j ==> loose applications that I no longer have disks for

p ==> use a backup + restore

i ==> cloning isn't needed

partition backup / restore may invalidate software keys. if you have license information for all your apps, you are AOK (probably). If not, you may need clone -- but you can still invalidate some keys that use hardware signatures (size of the boot partition is usually part of the signature). in any case, keep the origional disk unmolested until you test your restore.

You can and should restore the disk signature when you backup and restore. This avoids the activation issue with some software.