Salta al contenuto principale

Acronis License Question

Thread needs solution

I want to clone my old drive and reinstall OS and files to a new hard drive due to issues with a particular program.

If that does not solve the problem I'm going to install a new Windows 7 professional operating system on a new internal hard drive in the same PC

Will my copy of Acronis still be valid if I install it on a new hard drive with a new OS on the same PC?

Thanks
Pam

0 Users found this helpful

Yes it will. Depending on if you have purchased a single licence or family pack you may be asked to deactivate the link from your old OS to the new one and reactivate it.

Thanks Colin

Another question is the manual says the source disk and the target disk during a clone operation should be in separate locations. I don't understand.

What I want to do is replace an aging hard drive with a new larger drive and i just installed the new one in the PC with the source hard drive.

How do I clone the drive if I only have one PC?

safest way, always working:
backup your complete original disk to an external drive (which is anyway the best strategy)
create acronis boot media (and test if it's booting and recognizing your external drive)
replace harddisk
boot acronis media and restore backup from external drive

Thanks, Ken

I'm confused about the difference between me backing up my drive and restoring it onto a new drive installed on my PC

Versus going to all the trouble of taking out the source drive, turning it into an external USB drive so I can clone the target drive

I hope my question is clear but I'm still confused :-O

It is possible to clone to an internal drive, however there are some problems that you need to be aware of.

Once the clone has taken place, the PC must not be rebooted until either the original or new disk has been disconnected. On first reboot the PC must not see two drives that contain the same booting information.

The clone should also be started from the recovery media and not from within Windows.

Make doubly sure that you know which disk is which, as cloning the new disk to the old one by mistake, will leave you with all your files lost, the reason why it is preferable to have the two drives in two physically different purposes.

@ Colin

So it's mostly a safety precaution? Thanks for explaining that. I understand finally.

Pam

@ Colin

I want to move the contents of my 1000 GByte harddisk to a 256 GByte SSD. The amount of data I have will fit easily on the SSD. But I have a 9 GByte Dell Factory Recovery volume at the end of the 1000 GB harddisk. Is it possible to keep access to this volume after cloning it to the SSD?

The answer to your question Berti is maybe!

Cloning will copy copy everything that is on the drive, however, sometimes though OEMs like to set their disks out in a non standard way (Dell often a culprit here). Everything will be copied over, it may not though put the recovery partition in the right place for the Dell Recovery option (either off the start menu or from an F button at boot time) in the right place. So it will be there, but the F button option won't find it or the BCD menu won't find it without (in the case of the BCD) updating it.

It is also possible that there will be no problem finding it.

If you have a spare external drive I would advise making a complete disk image and then restore that as you can manipulate it more than just straight cloning.

Either way, as this is your OS drive, make sure you perform the operation from the recovery environment and not starting it from within Windows.
Also make sure that on first boot, you do not have both disks installed in your PC.

Colin,

thanks for your answer. I see, I simply have to try it the way, you described.