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.)
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.
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.
Then select the destination drive.
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.
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.
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.”
Then click the service partition and click “Next” again.
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.