How to Clone a Laptop Hard Drive with Acronis True Image (Page 2 of 2)

Article by Lamar Stonecypher (20,035 pts ) , published Nov 9, 2009

This takes you back to the partitions screen, which is now labeled “Manual Relayout.” You’ll notice that the service partition is now showing 7 GB.

You'll need to loop through the relayout again in order to give the saved drive space back to the primary partition. This can take some time, but don't proceed until you're satisfied.

If cloning to a hard drive mounted in the laptop and running True Image in Windows, a restart is needed at this point. Then comes some of True Image’s traditional magic.

When the laptop restarts, it will start the cloning process without starting Windows. This ran for about 41 minutes and was not much to look at – mainly just a couple of track-bars.

If running from the boot disk, True Image will show a summary screen. The last item in the list will be to transfer the MBR or master boot record, which is what makes the new hard drive bootable. Select "Proceed," and True Image will start the cloning process. This also ran for about 41 minutes, although no reboot was needed.

After the operation is complete, select Operations, then Exit. While it's shutting down, remove the boot disk from the CD/DVD drive.

In either case, go to "Computer" after the restart, and you’ll see that you now have two identically named hard drives.

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All that’s left now is the physical act of removing and replacing the laptop’s hard drive with the one from the enclosure.

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You may also be interested in reading the full Bright Hub Review of True Image 2009. If so, please follow the first link in the next section.

Further Reading

Bright Hub Review: Acronis True Image Home 2009 - Long revered for its ability to provide perfect disk images for cloning laptop drives, Acronis True Image also includes a powerful and fast backup feature that can provide entire drive backup as well as incremental backups. In this illustrated review, we take True Image Home 2009 through its paces.

Is Using Vista's Hybrid Sleep Good for my Laptop - Curious about whether the new power saving modes in Vista are actually better for use on the desktop than on your laptop? Here we look at Vista's hybrid sleep mode and how hibernation and sleep are different from Windows XP.

Bright Hub Review: APC UPB90 Universal Laptop Extender - Carrying and swapping laptop batteries on the plane is no fun. What if you could have a powerful battery extender capable of powering the notebook from your laptop's slim-line carrying case? Here we review the APC UPB90 universal laptop battery and find it to be an effective, but expensive product.

How to Dual Boot Windows 7 and Vista - Interested in trying the the Windows 7 beta version on your Vista PC? Vista includes a "Shrink Tool" that can re-size your Vista partition to make room for Windows 7. This can get complicated, but in this detailed step-by-step guide we cover shrinking the Vista partition and installing Windows 7.

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12 Comments

Showing page 1 of 2 (12 Comments)
Nov 9, 2009 5:14 PM
Alejandro Tenorio
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.
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!
Nov 3, 2009 3:35 PM
Alejandro Tenorio
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...
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
Oct 21, 2009 8:14 PM
RE: How to Clone a Laptop Hard Drive with Acronis True Image
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.
Oct 21, 2009 7:18 PM
Marcelo Rodriguez
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
Aug 11, 2009 5:34 PM
RE: How to Clone a Laptop Hard Drive with Acronis True Image
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!
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.
Jul 29, 2009 8:26 AM
Randy Harris
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
Jul 27, 2009 7:10 PM
Joe Stan
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!
Showing page 1 of 2 (12 Comments)