Successful Laptop Internal Hard Drive Replacement Windows Vista (Using USB External Hard Drive)
Howdy,
Just to throw it out there:
Internal Hard drive replacement using ACT (Acronis True Image Home 2010) and a USB External Hard drive.
Replaced 2.5" 120GB Hitachi Internal HD with a 2.5" 500GB WD Internal HD on a laptop computer (Toshiba Satellite L305-S5901) running Windows Vista, using a USB 500GB Seagate External HD. Too doggone easy! Thanks Acronis.
Used ACT to do it:
1) Used ACT to create an Acronis boot disk.
2) Attached USB 500GB Seagate Scorpio Blue External Harddrive.
3) Cloned my old 120GB Hitachi Internal HD to the USB Seagate 500GB External HD.
- Used the custom setting and created 2 partitions...
- NOTE: The cloning process wipes out all data on the external drive.
4) When finished cloning, after rebooting and waiting about 3 hours, then pressed any key to turn the system off.
5) Unplugged system and removed Battery. Swapped out the old 120GB Hitachi Internal HD with the new 500GB WD Internal HD. Replaced Battery.
6) Unplugged all drives from the system (USB Drive).
7) Powered on the computer and made sure the BIOS recognized the new HD.
8) Inserted the Acronis Boot Disk.
9) Exited the BIOS Setup Program.
10) Started Acronis Full Software then plugged in USB 500GB Seagate External HD.
11) Created NEW Partition (Disk?) on new 500GB WD Internal HD.
12) Cloned from USB 500GB Seagate External HD to 500GB WD Internal HD. Took about an hour or so.
13) When finished: Removed all disks and drives then powered off the computer (By pressing and holding the power button).
14) Restarted the System and it worked just fine.
That's about it. Just thought I'd throw it out there, I was worried it would be very difficult but, it worked that easily.
Hooagh!
SSG B
I was looking for a quicker way to install a larger hard drive in my laptop without having to resintall the OS, the apps and restoring my data. This would take me about 3 to 4 hours in the old way of doing it (I am old). For what I read here, I see that this is a fancy way to do what I wanted to do but, taking about the same amount of time or longer and speding more money. I do have a large USB drive but I it seems that if I use it to clone the original drive, the data currently in it would be wiped out. I don't want to buy another USB drive just for this.
Any other simpler suggestions any one?
You don't have to wipe out data on a target drive, you can make a backup of the source hdisk instead of cloning. Then the backup will be in a file that you can use ATI to restore to another hdisk.
So long as the size of the backup is smaller than the available disk space on the storage drive, it doesn't matter what else is on that drive. The backup will be jsut another file. The backup will be about the same size (or smaller) as the disk in use space on the source drdive -- i.e., only the sectors in use get backed up (not counting the page or hibernation files which aren't necessary to be backed up and would be wasted space.
Use Backup, not Clone ... then there's no need to mess with the USB drive and you can store as many Backup Images as space would allow and keep what you had before on the usb drive. Yes, Clone will wipe out everything, but Backup would not.
The only time you need to power down would be to swap out the laptop drives.
Before I got the suggestions above, I made a back up from the orginal drive (almost full 80 gig) to a USB drive (500 gig) Then, I swaped the orginal drive with the new internal hard drive in the laptop (300 gig) and cloned from the USB drive to the new internal. All went well but when I reboot the laptop i get the " NO NTLDR found"
Do I have to use some other procedure? or is there a way to install the NTLDR?
I appreciate all the help from the persons making suggestions.
Obviously I am doing something wrong because I don't believe Acronis would sell a product that doesn't work.
Before I got the suggestions above, I made a back up from the orginal drive (almost full 80 gig) to a USB drive (500 gig) Then, I swaped the orginal drive with the new internal hard drive in the laptop (300 gig) and cloned from the USB drive to the new internal. All went well but when I reboot the laptop i get the " NO NTLDR found"Do I have to use some other procedure? or is there a way to install the NTLDR?
What OS are u using? What version and build of True Image are u using? This was a fairly common error but I forgot what the solutions were
Obviously I am doing something wrong because I don't believe Acronis would sell a product that doesn't work.
Stick around longer .... you might just change your mind.
Before I got the suggestions above, I made a back up from the orginal drive (almost full 80 gig) to a USB drive (500 gig) Then, I swaped the orginal drive with the new internal hard drive in the laptop (300 gig) and cloned from the USB drive to the new internal. All went well but when I reboot the laptop i get the " NO NTLDR found".
If you really did a "Clone" procedure from the USB drive to the laptop drive, then it's not surprising it didn't work. Since you did a backup image, you need to restore that image to the laptop drive.
Otherwise, please clarify if you did an image backup or if you did a clone.