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unsupported hard drive

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Hey all,

Bought True Image 2012 Home for the purpose of cloning my old 80g drive to a bigger one. My Dell c521 only has the space and connections for one drive at a time, so my plan was to make an image of my whole disk to my external usb hd, take out the old, put in the new (WD Caviar green 500gb), and recover the contents onto the new hard disk from the file on my external usb hd. Sounds so wonderfully easy :)
Unfortunately the boot cd doesn't recognize the new hd (unsupported hard disk drives error) and after 3 chat sessions I am still at a loss. I was instructed to make a BartPE disk-which I can't do with my Dell Windows XP disk. I have swapped the drives about 4 or 5 times now and am growing tired of this fun experiment. This is the first time every doing this so I'm obviously no expert.

my actual question:

should I try a usb to sata adapter and clone the disk that way without having to take my computer apart every time? Will True Image "see" the HD that way if the boot cd can't see it?

Thanks in advance for any advice :)

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What you describe in your first paragraph is exactly what you want to do and is what Acronis recommends.

Reboot from the CD again and use the "add disk" option. Or, use XP and create a small partition of any size on the new disk. if you have a usb to sata adapter, you can use it to create the partition and/or the add disk option. But the bottom line is what you list in the first paragraph. You want the CD to see the external disk and restore the backup.

Thanks Grover! I think I have it whipped, though.

Since the boot CD wasn't working, I just needed to have both drives plugged in at the same time, so I would have something to boot with. I didn't realize that all I needed to do was take out my cd-rom drive and use those connections to run the new drive while cloning, rather than trying to use the image file on my usb drive.

'DOH!

I guess I wouldn't necessarily recommend this because the new drive had to sort of hang there precariously ( I gently set it on the box it came in), but actually the whole thing worked flawlessly after that, and I have removed the old drive and am running with the new one. AHHHHH, all that purple space looks nice on the pie graph. I'll just keep my fingers crossed that everything works-so far so good though. It only took about 20 minutes too :)

Now I'll have to read your guides on how to properly partition it and go from there.

Thanks for your reply-hope this helps anyone in the same situation as I was.

Thanks Jason for the update and suggestion. I am glad it worked for you. The reason I avoid cloning is due to the risk factor. See link below.

It sounds like your hard drive and cdrom drive is fairly easy to access. On some laptops, you have to remove the keyboard and the access is very involved.

ooh-thanks for the cloning risk info-I did not know that.

I'm glad I had an image on my usb drive saved :)

and yeah-my stuff was easy to access being a desktop, I wouldn't wanna try that on a laptop.

Thanks again