Is another boot disk needed if I have the Acronis TI Home 2009 CD?
I'm new at this. Running XP Pro SP3, and would like to clone my 160GB C drive to a replacement 500GB HD. I have the still unopened Seagate box, with its DiscWizard CD.
Because of all the problems possible that I've seen posted, and afraid of breaking my current system, I'd prefer not to install my (boxed) TI Home 2009. Can I simply boot from the Acronis disk, and use it to clone directly, or do as Grover suggests, and make a backup image first, then clone from the image to the new drive. I also have a 160 GB D drive, with enough space left to hold all of my current C drive contents - system and data.
Do I need to actually install Acronis? Do I need to make a Bart PE disk? Should I use the Seagate software - it seems to be a simpler, if limited version of an older TI version. Would that be easierthan using 2009 Home? (There have been users noting problems with it as well.) Would it need to be installed, or could I do everything from the boot disk?
All I want it to transfer everything to the new drive, and keep the old for disaster recovery. No need for regular backups etc., as I BU all new data to the D drive regularly.
Thanks for your help.
Thanks for your help, MudCrab. I followed your instructions, downloaded the ISO file and created a new TI boot disk, and per your article with Grover, imaged both partitions of the SATA C drive onto my internal D drive, and, for good measure, onto an external USB drive as well.
I chose the partitions backup, not the "disk" backup, but imaged the only two partitions on my present C drive: 1, an unlettered 63 MB Dell diagnostics FAT and 2, a 149GB NTFS partition holding system, apps and data. This is the way it came from Dell.
Now I'd like to write these partitions to a brand new 500GB drive. I understand I should keep the diagnostics partition at 63MB. Is it possible to increase the C partition size, and add another partition for data making 3 partitions on the new drive? Can you tell me how to do this? Or did I make a mistake in not originally imaging as a disk?
Not really sure that I need the 3rd partition, but think there might be some advantage to keep only system and apps on the new C drive, and use the 3rd partition only for data. Your thoughts on this would be appreciated as well.
Thanks again.
It looks like you have enough drives to experiment with safely. With the original drive disconnected (and removed from the system if you need the space), try restoring the Image to the other 160gb. Afterwards, see if it boots just like the original.
Thx, DwnNDrty. I will do just that. But when I started to think about adding another partition while this topic was still fresh on the forum, I wondered about adding the extra partition - how to do it, whether I needed to image the drive differently than what I did, and, ultimately whether there was any real advantage to having an extra partition. So far, having System, Apps and Data on my single partition has worked fine - it's just that I've seen so many posts about partitioning that I felt I should explore that!
Thanks MudCrab and DwnNDrty. All worked well, using the rescue CD. Decided to keep the original boot disk, and install the 500 as a new "D" drive for backups only, since the images from 2 computers are fairly large. I included a couple of 32GB FAT32 partitions, to hopefully be able to add files from my Mac as well, which I understand can read/write to FAT 32.
After all the problems noted on these Forums, still haven't had the courage to install the Acronis software!
Thanks again for your help.