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Restoring or Cloning to a new larger drive

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I have had a look at some the guides and posts in the forums and I think I have missed something if someone would be kind enough to clear these finer details up for me that I am confused about.

My main hard drive is 500gb. There isn't any partitions or anything like that that I am aware of apart from the possibility that Windows Ultimate x64 thats installed on my main drive could have installed a small partition for bit locker etc. I don't use this facility and I just installed windows as standard on it. I have taken an image of this drive.

I decide I want to go out and purchase a new larger 1TB HDD. I don't know the best method to taking my image of my current main drive and putting it on the new one. So here is some of the questions I was speaking of:

1) Do I first of all need to connect my new 1tb drive to my pc and format it to NTFS before considering
restoring or cloning my main current drive?

2) As far as I am aware if I wanted to restore my current drive to the new larger one I would:

Remove (or disconnect) the original drive.
Install the new drive.
Boot to the TI CD and restore the image to the new drive.

Would I then need to tick the boxes for recovering the MBR and Track 0?
Would I need to tick the box to recover the disk signature?

3) If I don't check the recover disk signature box will Windows and programs still work? Is this
necessary as after all this is a new drive?

4) Similarly when cloning to a new drive do you need to recover disk signature, MBR and Track 0 or
does cloning do this automatically? I am asking this as I am not sure which method to use at this
stage.

I know the above may seem quite obvious. But I want my new drive to make the effort for my new drive to run flawlessly after the changeover. Any help would be appreciated.

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You don't need to format the new drive although some folks find it useful to install the new disk and intitialize it in the Windows Disk manager.

When you do a full disk restore to a disk, ATI takes care of the formatting.

If you are recovering to a diff size drive, then first do a partition restore of the desired partition and you can specify how much of the target disk to allocate for the imge to be restored. Then you can go back and restore any other partitions liekwise and the mbr.

Iirc, W7 uses a hidden partition for some of the system files so you will want to restore all of the partitions from the source harddisk.

Clonging would take care of the MBR etc.

Thanks for the response Scott.

When doing the restore option, should i restore the MBR and Track 0 and more importantly should I also restore the disk signature in order for windows and my programs to work?

You want to resize one of the partitions, so I'd do that one by itself, to keep things simple, then come back and restore the remaining partitons and MBR and Track 0. win and your progs should all work bu the one resized partiton will be a diff size.

I think that's the simplest want to go.

Ideally I would like to have my new hard drive like my current one. My current one when in my computer just says C Drive. There is no partitions or anythings like that when I look in my computer right now.

When I install the new drive I want to restore or clone my current drive to the new one and leave the rest of the space unallocated. i.e one big drive, no partitions or anything like that. Hence I asked about restoring the disk signature to the new drive. I wasn't sure about any hidden partitions as I read somewhere that windows 7 ultimate automatically installs a hidden partition for bit locker. I don't know for sure as I don't use it.

Every hard "drive" that you see under Windows is a partition on a hard disk. There can be more than one bu ther must be at least one. I you right click My computer in win and select Manage and Select Disk Management, it will show all the drives and partitions, even indicating any "hidden" ones that don't normally show up in Explorer.

Thanks again for your response. I done as you said and sure enough my C Drive is one big drive. So I think I will install the new drive, boot from the TI rescue CD and restore an image from my current drive which is on an external to this new larger drive. I will then choose the proportional method to restore to the new drive to make sure the image takes up the whole drive space. I will also choose the options of restoring the MBR and Track 0 and choose to restore the disk signature so there is no conflicts.

Hopefully all will go well.

Sound slike you have it whipped. Best part is you are working from a backup, so if anything goes wrong (say, a power outtage in the middle of the process), you still have your ioriginal image ;)

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Hello All....
I have been following the posts and will be doing nearly the same thing.
Backup the C drive and restore it to a new HD.

I have a question concerning the MBR and Track 0 .... whatever that is... I have a pretty good idea but I'll just hold onto that one and let the experts assist.

I thought all I had to do was make a disk backup (to external drive) , put in the new HD and do a disc restore from the 2010 Boot CD..
I did not see anything concerning backing up the MBR or track 0. All I see is the choice of what drive to back up. I happen to have a second drive in the machine that runs Win7 and I can choose what drive to boot from during startup.

My question is what is all this about the MBR and restoring the MBR and track 0 AFTER restoring my disk image. I thought that if I restored my disk image to a larger drive, that was it...boot away... assuming that the new disk is (like Paul's) larger.

Do we have to restore something else after that....
oh, reason to do this... I am going to use revo uninstaller, remove 2010 and install 2011.... BUT I want to be able to go back to the original disk BEFORE the uninstall if anything goes crazy on me. So jsut forget the 2010 and 2011 thing...I am most interested in the absolute rock solid way to back up a running C drive and properly restore it to a new HD....

Hope all that makes sense...

Steve
Perdido Beach, AL

Here's a very abbreviated, rough-shod, explanation. When you turn on your PC, the cmmputer CPU is designed to look for the BIOS and run the instrudctions there. the BIOS (a small amount of programming built into the motherboard) runs through some routines to check out if the equipment is working, then it looks for a disk with system info. Where it looks first is controlled by the settings in the BIOS. When it finds the disk, it looks for the starting point and then reads and does whatever instructions are there. It expects the instrudctions to be there so they have to be in the place where the BIOS will look -- MBR (Master Boot Record) and Track 0. In this way, the PC pulls itself up into operation by its own bootstraps, hence the term "bootstrap", usually shortened to "boot" for this bit of coding -- and because Americans love to term nouns into verbs, this operation is also called "booting." The bootstrap tells the computer what files the PC should look for, and where (usually somewhere onthe same disk) to load up an operating system.

If you want to put what's on your system disk onto a new disk of the same size, then, in ATI, just do a My Computer backup of the entire disk. and then swap in the new disk, boot with the ATI bootCD and restore the entire backup to the new disk, you can check off the box for the entire disk, which captures everything and puts it on the new disk. You will still have your original disk in the same condition as when you backed it up plus you will still ahve the backup file -- sweet deal in case anything goes wrong with the restore although most of the time nothing goes wrong.

If the new disk is a different size, then it's slightly more complicated. Check out the Stickie s on this forum for Grover's little guide
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/3426

plus there's stuff already in this thread above, plus there's stuff all over this forum but the best place to start is in the collection of stuff in the Sticky of Grover's .

good luck. Have fun,
sh