Transfering old data to a newly installed HD>

Sometime soon I plan to install my new 320gb hard drive in my m1330 to replace my 160gb. I have Acronis True Image and Disk Manager installed. My plan is to make an image of my current 160gb drive and store it on my external using True Image, then wipe the 160gb drive using Disk Manager. Once I've physically installed the 320gb drive, how do I transfer the old drive's image onto the 320gb drive? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

 

This is just a guess, but I would not make a full image of the old drive, I would make an image of the factory partition from the old drive, and then just copy the remaining files from the old drive to a seperate folder on the external drive. Now the trick is going to be how to copy the factory partion from the external drive to the newly installed drive. You dont have to erase anything from your old drive, so just stick in the new drive , see what happens, and if you cant do anything with it, just put the old drive back in. I admit this is kinda like the blind leading the blind, but I dont think it will hurt to try. For now, dont wipe out anything from the old 160GB drive.

 

Yeah, that was about what I was thinking. I'm going to make an image, store it on my external, transfer it over using a True Image boot flash drive and then swap drives and wipe the 160gb. Thanks for the help... nice to have some affirmation.

 

Dont whipe the 160gb hd till you are positve that everything is set up right.

 

I have done this using a product call DFSee ( www.dfsee.com). Among other things it will image the drive. What I did was to:
- Mount the original laptop drive in a desktop as a secondary drive
- Create an image of each partition onto the desktop drive
- Swap the original drive for the new drive in the desktop
- Restored each partition image to the new drive.

As well as imaging functions, DFsee can resize most partitions. This can be done when restoring the image. As I was moving to a larger drive, I used this to expand each partition. But, if I was doing this on a machine with Vista, I would restore the partitions with a gap between them and then use Vista's disk management functions to resize the partitions.


David

 

Thanks alot, so thats how its actually done! OK , now how do you do it if you dont have a Desktop available, but you do have an external drive?? Can it be done without the aid of a desktop?

 

It the same method. What I didn't mention was that I started to this this earlier in the year with my wife's laptop and an external case. I mounted the new drive in the external case and started DFSee from a CD to clone the drive. After it settled in and I saw how long it was going to take, I decided to swap the drives first (new drive in the laptop, old drive in the external case). Unfortunately, sometime during the swap the old drive died. Luckily there was a recent backup and my wife only lost about a weeks worth of e-mails

The advantage of putting the drives in a desktop is speed. Cloning the 60GB drive to the external drive was going to take over 24 hours. Using an IDE or SATA connected drives in a desktop should be a lot faster.

Note: The DFSee clone command is intelligent enough to copy a partition from one drive to a dissimilar drive. Or a complete drive to another drive. If it a Windows boot partition is copied, the BOOT.INI may need to be adjusted afterwards. I don't know how, I just know it probably needs to be done.

David