Multi-boot Hard Disk Changeover

Calvin, welcome to these user forums.

Before doing anything with regards to your new system / motherboard, I would strongly recommend making a full disk backup of your current multiboot hard drive so that you can use this in the further steps that will be needed.  If you have installed ATIH 2016 on the current system, then you can use this to make the backup to an external backup drive, but the key here is to ensure that you include all partitions, including hidden ones.

If you don't have ATIH 2016 installed but have registered your copy and created an Acronis account, you can download and create the Acronis bootable Rescue Media - this is available as an ISO (CD) image file but can be burnt onto a USB stick if preferred using ISO to USB.
If you have ATIH 2016 installed, you can make the Rescue Media from within the application to either CD/DVD or USB - you will need this media later, plus you will also need to create the Acronis Universal Restore media (again on either CD or USB stick).

So, at this point you should have 2 sets of Acronis boot media (Rescue and Universal Restore) plus an entire disk backup of your current drive.

The procedure from this point will involve you doing the hardware changes to replace your motherboard and change your BIOS options.  You should ensure that you can boot from the Acronis Rescue Media in Legacy mode in order to restore your backup of the original drive to a new drive now installed in the system.  Note: I would recommend removing any other internal drives  or disconnecting the cables to the same, so as to avoid any mistakes!  One further check here is to compare the disk controller mode used on the original motherboard with that used on the new one - you should have these set to the same mode, i.e. AHCI.

The next step is to restore your backup to the new drive then shutdown and disconnect the backup drive and remove the rescue media.

Next, boot the system from the Acronis Universal Restore media which is needed to prepare the restored versions of Windows to work with the new hardware being introduced by your new motherboard, i.e. new disk controller, and other integrated controllers etc.  
Note: you may need to repeat this step for each detected version of Windows given this is a multiboot system.

See KB documents: 
2149: Acronis Universal Restore for an overview of this tool.  
56637: Acronis True Image 2016: Restoring to Dissimilar Hardware with Acronis Universal Restore​
56610: Acronis True Image 2016: Creating Bootable Media 
ATIH 2016 User Guide: Acronis Universal Restore
117004: Great Acronis "How-To" videos and other Acronis Resources

Further comments: 

• Windows 10 and 7 will need to be reactivated when moved to different hardware unless you have a full retail license or similar - OEM versions of Windows are activated / licensed only to the system where they were first installed / activated.
• The backup of your Linux Mint partition may be done using sector-by-sector method which is cause the backup size to be effectively equal to the size of the partition as ATIH will backup all sectors in the partition when using this mode.
• It is recommended to perform a CHKDSK /F for both your Windows partitions before doing the backup to ensure there are no file system issues.

Hi Steve,

Just wanted to give you a quick shout back in appreciation for your prompt and detailed response.

One quick question. Will Acronis automatically handle all the partitioning of the new HDD and the formating in the correct Windows/Linux file systems involved for the various partitions, or is this something I'll have to do myself.

I'll spend some time digesting your recommendations and see if I have any more questions. I'll try to do my due diligence (which may answer my above question) and try not to be a pain! Again, thanks very much for your time.

Calvin, if you make an 'entire disk' backup and restore this as the same, i.e. selecting 'entire disk' (in effect selecting at the disk drive level and not selecting any individual partitions), then Acronis will restore the partitions as saved.

There should be no need to prepare or format the new HDD beforehand as this would be wiped out by the restore process.  See again the ATIH 2016 User Guide: Recovering your system to a new disk under bootable media where it uses the term Recover whole disks and partitions for what you are needing to do, but ignore the further steps which are asking you to only select certain partitions and not select the MBR and Track 0.  Because you are restoring the whole disk backup to a new drive, you want to keep this as simple as possible, so click on the top Disk 1 box (as shown in the guide) and then select the target disk to restore the backup to - you want the MBR and Track 0 to be restored because this is how your Linux boot manager (Grub2 ?) knows how to boot the system.

Note: I am assuming that you are sticking your plan to use another drive of the same capacity (500GB) as the original drive, and therefore are not needing to do any resizing of partitions.

Thanks, Steve. I think This clarifies things for me to a great extent. I still plan to use the 500Gb HDD which is the same nominal capacity as the original, the difference being the original is a Western Digital and the new one will be a Segate.

You would be well advised to make two backups of your original disk. Do the first as Steve suggested. Do the second as an entire disk backup just like the first, with the exception that you select the "sector by sector" option. This is a necessary fail safe in case Acronis doesn't handle the partitioning and restore properly. The backup will be the full 500 GB of the original disk. Make sure you have enough backup space available. This will give you two chances at a full disk restore. The only thing that could go wrong with restoring the sector by sector backup would be if, for some reason, the Seagate 500 GB drive is a few bytes smaller than the WD drive.

You will also have a third option. You could prepare the new hard drive with the same partition layout as the original drive. Then you would be able to use the first backup (not the sector by sector backup) to restore one partition at a time instead of doing a full disk restore. It take a little patience to make sure you restore all the partitions to the correct loactions, but it should work.

If I may make an alternative suggestion from someone who's been there. I used to get deep into multi-boot systems with both Windows and Linux on the same disk. One day I woke up and decided it wasn't worth all the trouble. My new rule is one hard drive/one operating system. I do this by using a drive bay with exchageable drawers. When I want to change systems, I shut down and change the drawer to the next system. Then I start up and enter the BIOS to make the changes needed to boot the new system. It goes very quickly as you get use to the setting for each system. This was the best thing I ever did. My life is so much simpler now. It also has a huge advantage. You can use Lagacy boot mode for one system and UEFI/Secure Boot for another system. This is great because you don't need to find compromise BIOS settings that will somehow work with all your systems. You should definitely take advantage of UEFI/Secure Boot on a GPT formatted disk for your Windows 10 system.

Paul, thank you for your contribution to this topic discussion - I too used to have multiboot systems with Linux etc and agree that having removable drive caddies is a much easier way to handle these environments, especially when there is any need to start changing partition sizes, which is a whole lot simpler when working with a separate drive per OS.  

Paul,

Thanks very much for your suggestions. With the hardware I have on hand I can easily do the sector by sector backup in addition to the other and it seems like a very smart move as a fall back and maybe I'll play around with it to learn something in any event. I really want this transition to go as smooth as possible as this is my main machine and as you can imagine I want to minimize down time and problems. I'm trying to do my homework in advance and break the cycle of learning everything the hard way!

The interchangable drawers is an interesting concept. Not sure I can get them where I live, but certainly worth looking into down the road if I can lay my hands on some.

Very much appreciate both your's and Steve's time and suggestions.

You're welcome.

I use this drawer swap setup from StarTech.com

Drive bay with drawer    Part# DRW115SATBK

Drawer only   Part# DRW115CACSBK

These have metal drawer removal handles that have been bullet proof for many years. They have cheaper models with plastic parts that people say tend to break.

One word of caution for your learing curve. No backup program (including Acronis) ever resulted in a bootable Linux system. I alway had to run a command to refresh LILO. I don't know if you are using GRUB or LILO, but you may want to look into this issue. I don't remember the command as it has been many years since I played with Linux. Maybe the "sector by sector" backup option will solve this problem. 

Paul,

Thanks for the heads up on Linux. I'll look into it. I'm a real novice when it comes to Linux as I'm just making the jump. Trying to get away from Windows as I don't like the direction Microsoft is going with Windows 10. It's going to be real hard because of all the 3rd party software that supports Windows as opposed to Linux, but why not test the waters. I plan to pretty much ignore Windows 10 and use Windows 7 for the near term when Linux can't handle what I need. We'll see how things will shake out over time.

Appreciate the link to the drive bay and drawer. Neat stuff.