How to Clone a Laptop Hard Drive with Acronis True Image

Written by: Lamar Stonecypher • Edited by: J. F. Amprimoz
Updated Nov 9, 2009 • Related Guides: Hard Drive

Hard drive filling up and declining hard drive prices getting your attention? If you're ready to move up to a bigger hard drive for your laptop, this tutorial will show you step-by-step in pictures how it's done in Acronis True Image Home 2009.

The objective of this tutorial is to go through all the steps involved in using Acronis True Image Home 2009 to copy and clone a notebook hard drive to a larger replacement drive.

First of all, you should already have the new, replacement hard drive mounted in either an external USB- or FireWire-connected enclosure, or mounted within the laptop itself (in something like a ThinkPad's Ultrabay).

When cloning to another internal hard drive, the process can be done within Windows. However, when cloning to an external drive, you need to have prepared an emergency boot disk within True Image and to have booted the notebook from it.

Note that it's not possible to create a bootable disk on an external drive in Windows because of a flag that Windows sets that identifies the drive as external. True image will not warn you about this, and the documentation is not clear, either. We had to learn this from tech support.

Ready to get started? In the main True Image window in the Windows version or the boot disk version, click Utilities in the left-hand lower menu.

Then click "Clone Disk." This will start up the “Disk Clone Wizard.” (We found out earlier that wizards abound in True Image.)

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True Image has two cloning modes – manual and automatic. The automatic mode proportionally applies the same ratio of the original partitions to the target drive. In other words, if the new drive has twice as much space as the old one, partitions will be created that are twice as large.

This can be wasteful on a laptop. For example, my ThinkPad has a 6.71 GB service partition that contains the Vista recovery files and the small program that runs for Rescue and Recovery, Lenovo’s own restoration utility. This partition does not need to get any bigger, but it does need to be copied to the new drive.

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If you have a hard drive in your laptop that contains a service, recovery, or restore partition, you’ll want to select the manual mode.

The next step is to select the source drive. In doing this, you’re actually selecting the entire drive, which can be a little confusing from the display.

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Then select the destination drive.

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If the new hard drive is already formatted, it will contain at least one partition. At this point, it’s safe to tell True Image to delete any partitions on the destination drive.

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Then it asks the same question about the old hard drive. Do you want to delete the data, destroy the data, or select a new layout for the partitions on the drive? Here we elected to keep the data on the drive intact.

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As can be seen in the image below, it’s offering to create a 10.7 GB service partition on the new hard drive. However, we only need about 6.1 GB. The oddly worded “Proceed Relayout” button at the bottom must be selected in order to change the assignments. Then click “Next.”

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Then click the service partition and click “Next” again.

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Here Acronis True Image will not accept values that can’t be done. In another interface oddity, it says that the minimum size is 6.144 GB and the maximum is 10.74 GB, but it does not accept numbers with decimal points. I entered 7 because it was closest to the 6.71 GB that I actually wanted.

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Ilan Mar 27, 2011 5:12 AM

solving hanging boot problem

Hi Lamar,
Thank you for the published information.
Though it includes valuable information there is some missing as well – please have a look on the link attached: http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.shtml#regkey
This is quite crucial for successful boot afterwards.
I personally had this problem when cloning T60P. I failed to solve it with the suggested solution #3, but #2 worked fine for me.
Thanks, Ilan

Lamar Stonecypher Jan 29, 2010 9:40 AM

Question From T61 User

Hi, Trey,

I've been fortunate. I've used ThinkPads since 1999 and I've never actually had to use Rescue and Recovery, although I've faithfully made the rescue disks.

And, no, I have not run R&R from the recovery partition on that hard drive. I no longer have the drive permanently installed in my T61p. However, when I place in the drive bay and start it from the drive list, it's still offering to initiate R&R.

I currently have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and Ubuntu 64-bit installed. Windows 7 works a charm on it.

I also don't use a hard drive password. I have some ThinkVantage utility managing the Windows password through the TPM (trusted platform module) for me. I'd think that you'd want to clear a hard drive password before running the cloning.

Thanks for the comment!

TreyDeuce Jan 29, 2010 1:12 AM

You are sure the recovery partiitons will also image over and work? Did you ever test your image on the newer imaged drive by actually physically swapping it and initiating a ThinkVantage Recovery? Also is it necessary to turn off the HDD password before making the image? Thanks!

Alejandro Tenorio Nov 9, 2009 5:14 PM

Great Partition Wizard tip!

Lamar,

Thanks for the Partition Wizard tip. This little free utility did the job! I could recover all the partitions from the original hard disk.

To be honest, I found your page 'after the fact'. I had 'enlarged' my laptop HD once using Acronis True Image, but using the more conservative Backup/Restore approach.

This second time around, I didn't have available an external HD with enough available free space to hold the backup... sooo, based on my previous satisfactory results using Acronis TI, I decided to try the Clone Wizard running from the Acronis TI boot CD, and then disaster followed.

Thanks for your support.

Lamar Stonecypher Nov 5, 2009 1:48 PM

RE: How to Clone a Laptop Hard Drive with Acronis True Image

Hi, Alejandro,

It sounds like you may have missed the step of telling True Image from the boot disc to transfer the MBR (master boot record). It's way down on the bottom of the list on the Summary screen.

For recovering your partitions, and therefore, your data from the old drive, try Partition Wizard Boot CD (free) from MT Solution Ltd. at

http://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-wizard-bootable-cd.html

Boot from it and see if you can "recover" or "unhide" the partitions.

Thank you for commenting. I hope this helps!

Alejandro Tenorio Nov 3, 2009 3:35 PM

Problem booting Vista after cloning

I tried to clone the HD of my HP dv6920 laptop to a larger HD, using the Acronis True Image Workstation BootCD. Target drive was attached as external USB HD.

Problem is: when I installed the target drive in the internal HD bay, Vista just won't boot. I get a BSOD with stop code 0x0000007B. If I try booting in Safe Mode, i get the same blue screen after loading driver crcdisk.sys.

To make things worse, the so called 'Clone Wizard' deleted all partitions from the source drive, so I cannot go back to using it.

The target cloned drive has all the files and partitions from the original (larger partitions though, as intended) but it won't boot Vista.

You mentioned something about the hard disk being marked as external, and hence, unbootable. I guess the clone setup to an external USB drive is the problem.

Vista Repair Wizard run from the DVD stops saying it can't fix the problem, and it gives a diagnostic report indicating 'ExternalStorage' as the cause.

So far I have tried (unsuccessfully) the UpperFilters solution from: http://blogs.mgtechgroup.com/markc/archive/2007/06/24/Acronis-Uninstall-caused-Vista-to-BSOD-with-0x0000007B-in-crcdisk.sys.aspx

Also the 'merge SATA drivers' into the registry CriticalDeviceDatabase, solution from http://www.vistax64.com/vista-hardware-devices/119070-problem-enabling-ahci-under-vista-x64.html No joy either.

Also tried bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot from DOS recovery console.

Any further ideas are welcome...

Tolga BALCI Oct 22, 2009 1:44 PM

RE: thats good ....but

Hello Marcelo,

You did not tell which Linux distro is on the laptop or if you want to clone it with Linux utilities. If that's your case, I mean clone the disk with two partitions with Linux utilities, I suggest you to take a look at partimage program. You can find it very useful.

Tolga

Lamar Stonecypher Oct 21, 2009 8:14 PM

Hi, Marcelo,

Although Acronis advertises that True Image can handle Linux filesystems, since you don't have an optical drive and can't boot to Acronis's Linux CD, you will need to look around for a (possibly native Linux) flash-based solution. You might check Clonezilla, for example.

Your other option would be to take both drives- your current one and the new one- and use a desktop machine that can mount them both to clone them.

Maybe some of the readers or other writers will have a better idea. if you do, speak up here.

Marcelo Rodriguez Oct 21, 2009 7:18 PM

thats good ....but

1- my notebook have not a diskette.
2- ¿what happen if thet notebook disk have a linux
partition?

Thank you in advance

Marcelo

Lamar Stonecypher Aug 11, 2009 5:34 PM

Hi, Randy,

That's one I don't know. I haven't used FAT32 on a primary partition for years now. I'd suggest asking Acronis about that one. Good luck!

Lamar Stonecypher Jul 29, 2009 12:56 PM

Cloning from larger to smaller

Hi, Joe Stan,

While using Acronis to clone from a larger drive to a smaller drive should not present a problem, you could also try shrinking the partition itself before cloning it. I'd try cloning first, but I also covered shrinking a partition in an article about dual booting Windows 7 and Vista. I'll add that link at the end of the article.

Randy Harris Jul 29, 2009 8:26 AM

Cloning with Acronis

My source drive contains partitions D and C with D being a FAT32 and C NFTS. I want to go from a 250 gb to a 1tb. In using the Acronis wizard's manual settings, when I go to select the manual relayout it will only let me give the D FAT32 the opportunity to expand or contract, the C NFTS is greyed out and will not allow me to add to it only subtract. This is the drive that I need to be expanded. On the Acronis screen showing my disk with the partitions, it has the D drive listed first. I believe my D has the recovery files in it. Any suggestions? Thanks

Joe Stan Jul 27, 2009 7:10 PM

Thank!

Thank you for the post. Would there be any complications in cloning from a larger laptop hard drive to a smaller laptop hard drive?

For example, I want to clone the contents from a 320gb hard drive to a 160gb hard drive. (The size of the data concerned is nowhere near 160gb).

Most guides detail cloning from a smaller capacity hard drive to a larger, so I would like to know if the converse is possible.

Thank you!

Kerry Jul 10, 2009 7:15 PM

Exactly what I wanted to know!

Thanks for writing this thorough guide! The whole scenario fits mine.

Joe Jul 4, 2009 9:32 AM

THANKS!

Thanks you for writing this article...answered a number of questions that I've been searching for from numerous places. Wish Acronis would put this level of detail int their documentation.

How to Clone a Laptop Hard Drive with Acronis True Image

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