Need some help with HDClone..

Hey everyone,

I'm having a little bit of trouble upgrading the hard drive on my dad's old Dell Inspiron 8600. We're trying to move all his data from his old 60GB hard drive to a new 320 GB hard drive. We have a USB enclosure and everything, and the copy says it's finished (using HDClone free version on a bootable disk). It says it resizes the partitions and such, and that everything went fine.

However, when we put the new hard drive in, it won't boot. It stops at an underscore at the top left of the screen, with no activity. Old drive boots fine. I'm running the clone again, but I was wondering if there was anything I might be missing.. Anyone do this succesfully?

EDIT: Note: the new hard drive, when blank and in the enclosure, was not mounted by windows XP. It showed up in device manager and on HDClone, but was never assigned a drive letter. Does this matter? Thanks!


Both drives are IDE / ATA-6, with no jumpers installed. Any help will be appreciated!

 

Try using Acronis True Image (trial).

Also; I don't think the computer is that old that the drive is too large for its BIOS? Have you flashed it to the latest available?

 

I'll look in to Acronis, and that's actually a good question RE the bios. When installed, the hard drive shows up in BIOS as 137Gigs. I'll look in to a bios upgrade.

 

Yeah, if the BIOS is reporting a 320GB as 137GB then its definitely the BIOS's fault. You may have to get a (much) smaller drive.

Try the BIOS update (if it exists) before you re-clone the new HD, Good Luck!

 

The latest bios update is from 2005.. I don't know what size of drives they had in lappys back then, but I'll give it a shot. I don't think they make any smaller drives in IDE/ATA6. Fry's only had a WD in 160 and 320 gig sizes. He's had this drive over 95% full for the last 3+ years running 12-24 hours a day, and I'm pretty sure its on its last legs...

 

Try it of course (be 100% sure its for his notebook though!) but it seems like 2005 drives were just hitting 100GB for notebooks (or thereabouts).

http://www.storagereview.com/2005notebook.sr?page=0,1

 

Well, I found a 120 on Newegg in IDE/ATA6. Might have to take this one back to fry's and try that.

Man, I hate artificial BIOS limits. It's like my netbook - Windows can address 3gigs of ram, but the chipset won't even boot with over 2.

 

The HD limitation was mostly a BIOS limitation, but the RAM limitation is the chipset as you state - how else is Intel/AMD/SIS/nVidia/etc. going to get you to buy the next best thing?

 

Here's another question... if we buy the paid version of HDClone, we can choose the destination partition size. Would it work if we just cloned to a 136gig partition and left the rest of the drive blank? Any ideas?

 

Again, I'd try Acronis first (I think it will give you that option during the trial), but I'm not sure if it'll work (meaning a smaller partition) to be honest. (I think it will though).

In Acronis, use Manual Cloning and simply match the 60GB size of the original HD, then if Windows boots, just go to Disk Management and give yourself another partition (for free!).

When you format that new partition, move all your Dad's data over and you're golden!

If you get that far, I would actually re-install Windows from scratch, myself (with his data safe on the second 'data' partition you just created).

 

Well, I can confirm your idea would work, but in the interest of time I made a shortcut. The clone we restarted just before I posted this thread finished, I connected the drive to my machine, and used a partitioning tool to shrink the partition down to 136.5 gigs, and left the rest of the drive blank. Worked like a charm! Should be able to create another partition as well for more space.

Thanks for your help!

 

Even better when we think for ourselves (with some guidance)!

Glad to be of help. If there is any trouble with the new partition just partition to 137GB too and then create another one.

Cheers!