Newbie upgrading Laptop HDD
My laptop developed a bad sector, and the drive was getting too small anyways (500GB), so I got a new 1TB to replace it.
Using TI 2017 I'd like to transfer the current setup to the new drive. I'm reading in the instructions about cloning, but it seems to be describing a situation where there are 2 active drives and you are directcly cloning to the desination HDD. What I want is to transfer to an external HDD and use that image to make the new drive act like the original. As the title states, I am new at this and am likely misreading something, but don't want to go into tis blind as if something goes wrong, I won't have a way to fix it.
Heres what I have:
1) Laptop: 500GB HDD, Win7, diskcheck revealed a bad sector. The drive has 2 partitions: C and a D for Dell recovery. Also a DVD-R drive.
2) A new 1TB HDD out of the box
3) An external 2TB drive to transfer the image to/from.
My undsertanding is that I can clone (or backup?) the original to the External drive, replace the HDD, then use acronis to use the image. But the instructions don't seem describe my situation (I'm not directly cloning to the destination - I'm using the external as a transfer point.
My concerns are:
1) I've never done this before and have heard horror stories of people rendering their computers useless. This is my only computer so I need to make sure I understand everything beforehand since I won't have a comptuer to access the internet to troubleshoot if things go wrong.
2) If the bad sectors on the original will mess up the image
3) If the partitions & size difference between the drive will mess up the cloning process.
If any experts could please let me know if I am even in the right ballpark, and if so, could give detailed instructions on how to accomplish this, it would be greatly apprciated. Thank you!
Thanks Steve! That thread you linked to was actually what got me concerned.
Ok, so I'm NOT cloning. Glad I clarified that. Doing the backup.
I did the CHKDSK /R and that's how I discovered the bad sectors & what prompted me to get a new drive (I didn't even know I had bad sectors until then). It doesn't seem to be a HUGE problem right now, only a couple sectors and the computer isn't crashing or anything, but it's a matter of time with these things.
But you mentioned that bad sectors can be a problem - does that apply to backups as well?
Also, regarding the partitions, as I mentioned I have a C and a smaller D "Dell recovery" drive. What happens when I move to the larger drive? How does Acronis allocate the remaining 1TB? Does it put it all into the C (which is what I want), or will it inflate both drives proportionally (or worse, create a 3rd paritition?
Hozon, once you have made the Backup, then check the log files for any errors reported - download the MVP Log Viewer tool from the link in my signature and use this to look at the log files. If the Backup has hit any errors related to bad sectors then this should be reported in the logs but hopefully these have already be reallocated and there is no data stored in those sectors.
When making the Backup, I would recommend including all partitions, hidden, system, recovery etc, so that you have the full disk included.
When doing the Restore you have several options, you can Restore all the partitions 'as is', i.e. exactly as they were on the original drive (as would happen if doing a 1 to 1 clone), or you can allow Acronis to do an automatic resize of the partitions, but this could result in resizing some partitions that you wouldn't choose to increase in size.
My personal choice would be to restore 'as is' and then do the resizing of the C: partition as a separation action using a dedicated Partition Manager tool such as the free MiniTool Partition Wizard where you can fully control what is resized and by how much.
I agree with Steve that it is much easier to resize the partitions after you have the new drive up and running. I have tried to do it with Acronis recovery media and each time I end up with suboptimal results.
Ian
Thanks fpr the solid advice guys. As it turns about, the compter because unusable shortly after my last post. Don't know if it had to do with the bad sectors, but figured I wasn't going to chance it.
Things were going well until I got a kernel error. I rebooted using the acronis rescue disk, the windows install disk, tried all the repair options and nothing worked. In the end I just did a complete format and then recovered once I got windows working, but it bothers me that the acronis recovery disk didn't do anything.
Speaking of which , how is it that usb rescue disks (yes, even the official windows ones) still have to be in FAT? It would be so nice to be able to read 1 tib file instead of a bunch of them.
Oh, and Steve, your recomendation of free MiniTool Partition Wizard was gold. It was just perfect in terms of what I needed. Thanks!
Hozon, thanks for the update but sorry that the computer became unusable!
USB media needs to be FAT32 in order to be bootable and this is a Microsoft limitation and only applies to media that has to be booted. Your USB disk drives can be formatted as NTFS or GPT so that your .TIB files don't need to be split into smaller sizes to suit the filesystem.
Glad that the MiniTool Partition Wizard worked for you.