Acer 5315 Upgrade - Drive Clone to Larger Drive

Hoping this helps a few people.

First of all, I gained a lot of information from the 5315 CPU Upgrade Thread. I'd particularly like to thank BigOzone, Hoggie and Quilty997. There are many others but information from the above formed the basis of my upgrade.

Other information I've collected from other parts in the forum.

The specification of the laptop was as follows.

Acer Aspire 5315
Celeron 550 2.0Ghz (eek)
1gb of Ram
Vista Home Basic (double eek)
Atheros Wireless Card
80Gb Toshiba Hard Disk

The new Specification is.

Core2Duo T7500 2.2Ghz 800 Mhz Front Side Bus 4Mb Cache
3Gb of Crucial Ram
Vista Home Basic (No Choice At the Minute)
Intel 4965 AGN Wireless Card
200Gb Hitachi Hard Disk

The CPU Upgrade I won't actually cover, not necessary when there is a fantastic sticky at the top of this forum. The Upgrade took about 15 minutes, but the actual swap took about 5 minutes or so, I was very anal about cleaning the heatsink and applying AS5. I think the biggest scare was the door unerneath, quite tricky to get off and put back on without damaging the tabs.

My main focus is the hard drive swap, whilst maintaining all the eRecovery software. For this I use Acronis True Image Home, I am aware that the trial can be downloaded or users obtain by other means, can I just say BUY IT as it only cost me £17 from Amazon.co.uk and as usual it was cheaper in the US. The biggest reason for buying is that some features are not available in the trial. I also bought a Laptop SATA External Drive Holder and boy was I glad I did.

Anyway, I actually did the clone before I'd even booted up for the first time. If you have a fully working install, make sure you take a FULL backup prior to doing this, it's really easy with the built in software.

1) Start the laptop up and press F2 to go into setup, you have to be quite quick here, pressing a few times helps.
2) In the bios ensure the Enable F12 boot option is selected.
3) Connect the External drive bay with your new drive installed.
4) Insert the Acronis True Image Disk into the CD/DVD Rom drive.
5) Start the Laptop up and Press F12 repeatedly until the Boot Menu comes up.
6) Select Your CD/DVD drive and press enter, this will Boot from the Acronis CD.
7) Select Acronis True Image Home (Full Version)
8) Select Clone Disk (I did experiment with Backup to another USB disk and then Restore from USB Disk, this was messy and I wasn't sure it would work).
9) Select Manual Clone Mode
10) Ensure you know which disk is which before you start, it should be clear as the new drive will probably be larger.
11) Select the Disk you are cloning FROM (Source) and click next.
12) Then Select the Disk you are Cloning TO (Destination) and click next.
13) If there are already partitions on the new disk, you will be prompted to confirm that you want to delete partitions, accept the option to delete existing partitions. If this is a new drive this screen will not appear.
14) The next screen is important and the wording is slightly confusing. It asks you if you want to keep the data on the disk you are Cloning FROM, or Secure Wipe the Data also to create a new partition layout. I would strongly suggest you select Keep data as if this operation fails you have wiped your current working drive.
15) Next you will be asked for Data moving method, select Manual and click Next.
16) You will see Three Partitions. PQSERVICE, ACER and DATA.
17) Note down the size of the PQSERVICE partition before proceeding, on mine it was 9.759Gb. I have seen information that suggests this partition should not be resized. Not sure if this is correct but as the information stored on that partition is unlikely to change by any large amount (and has approximately 2Gb free anyway), I saw no reason to change.
18) At the bottom of the screen is a checkbox marked Proceed relayout, check this box and click Next.
19) You are now asked to select a partition to resize, click the PQSERVICE partition and click Next.
20) Resize the partition to EXACTLY the previously noted size and click Next.
21) You will now see the Manual Relayout screen again, click Next.
22) Select the Acer Partition (the second on the Disk) and Click Next.
23) Click on the Partition at the Top and drag it all the way left.
24) Now resize the partition to the maximum available (during the automatic part of the configuration it should have split the remaining partitions into approximately two equal parts), so this should be fine for most people. Click Next
25) The Final Partition DATA will now fill the rest of the disk. You can if you wish move the ACER partition down as above, then resize the partition to a smaller amount to allow the DATA Partition to be Larger. But you will have to go through the process above as for ACER partition (moving over and resizing to the end of the disk).
26) Now you are back at the Manual Relayout screen, de-select the Proceed Relayout checkbox and Click Next.
27) VERY IMPORTANT - This screen confirms every process that is to be carried out, read carefully and ensure this fits in with what you expect. More importantly, at the bottom (on mine at least) it mentions Copying the MBR (Master Boot Record), I believe this is where the information which allows the Laptop to boot from the Hidden partition when pressing ALT-F10 is stored.
28) Click Proceed and the cloning will take place. If this has no personal data and/or is a factory specification then this will take about an hour. Depending on the amount of data stored this will obviously take longer.
29) Once complete power off the laptop and swap the disks round, if this is necessary (I actually had my new drive in already and copied from the existing drive which was in my SATA External Bay).

The above process worked perfectly for me, indeed this morning I have taken a Full backup of my system using the built-in utility as part of eRecovery. I then booted the laptop up, started eRecovery using ALT-F10, selected the option to Restore to Factory Default. This restored the laptop to factory default after about 30 minutes. That booted fine, exactly as I started it up for the first time. I then did a Restore using a system backup, again using eRecovery by booting using ALT-F10, this restored my laptop to EXACTLY where I had left it about 90 minutes ago.

Bri

 

i have tried the same technique with an acer aspire pqservice hard drive to clone to a larger one. the only thing different in bri's excelllent description is that acronis true image home 2009 does not show an option to also clone the MBR.
what version of acronis are you using, bri?
thanks
this is after 10 tries, getting frustrated!!!
litimate

 

That guide was written for Acronis True Image Home, version 11, which cost me about £11 from Amazon.

Bri

 

nice one,

im now thinking, is the Acer 5315 one of the better laptops to upgrade ?

 

Tried to buy acronis on amazon, but they're out of stock. Anyone else found it on another site for the same sort of price?

 

Here. Try this http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&q=acronis&scoring=p

 

Thanks for this guide, worked perfectly (on acer 8935g). Couple of points to add confirm:

Didn't work well with acronis 2010 home. Version 11 worked fine though.

Managed to clone to a smaller drive using same method as OP.

Strangely, the acer arcade partition (if you have one) was copied but couldn't boot quite right, and bluescreened. (using F8 at boot start you could select one of the other boot options for the embedded xp, I think it was "restore operating system " or something similar) any way once selected it starts up ok, but no longer hibernates. No big shakes..in fact quite interesting..led to me be able to copy an xp pro install on that partition, and I now have xp pro when I start up the pc with the media button.

Thanks again...

 

About Cloning Software
here are two Free Legal NO EXPIRY WORKING programs

1 HDCLONE free version has very simple option to clone a drive to drive. including the MBR ( master boot record ). this means the hidden restore by ALT-F10 will work.
website is here Miray Software - HDClone - Hard disk copy, hard disk backup, hard disk rescue!
it runs in windows and creates a bootable version as well.

2 Partedmagic this creates a bootable Linux desktop in Ram ( looks like windows ) with many cloning and Partition managing software.
Click the start menu and choose CLONEZILLA it has a simple and advanced menu choice. It will clone everything and do it fast.
available here News

both of these programs have a lot of users, so they are well tested,

Thanks for all the work everyone has put into this site
I had a Celeron 530 1.73 Ghz 533 Mhz FSB. Thanks to everyone here I now have a T7100 Core 2 . It flys, in comparison.