How to Clone - IDE to SATA?

[Rustynuts]

I've got Acronis, but have never used it. My new MB only has one IDE slot and I've got two optical drives (no room for my old IDE boot drive!). So I need to clone the disk from IDE to SATA on my XP Pro machine. My old HD is partitioned into two drives also, 300 GB total.

Physically how do I do this? Do I install the new SATA disk AND format it in XP, or just hook it up and let Acronis handle everything. Do I need to partition it and clone each partition separately? If I just image the whole disk and it copies it over to the new one will I lose space on the new SATA? old HD is 300 and the new one is 500 I think?

Thanks, cloning newb.

[primesuspect]

Acronis is awesome. I just did this last week.

You just hook up the sata drive, boot into XP and let it detect it, and the run acronis and clone the disk from within windows. it'll reboot and do some stuff and then you just pull the old one and tell the bios to boot the new one - done.

[Ultra Nexus]

I´d use Norton Ghost for that... Get Hiren´s BootCD from the net, it has this and many other apps for disk cloning. :)

[Rustynuts]

Acronis is awesome. I just did this last week.

You just hook up the sata drive, boot into XP and let it detect it, and the run acronis and clone the disk from within windows. it'll reboot and do some stuff and then you just pull the old one and tell the bios to boot the new one - done.

Thanks, how does it handle the partitions? I assume it will be the same, but will I need to re-partition later to recover any lost space on the new HD?

[primesuspect]

It will offer you the chance to auto-proportion the partitions or set specific sizes. Just give it a shot, you'll see the interface and how easy it is - it's not like you can accidentally screw up your target drive - if you make a mistake or don't like the layout, just erase the drive and try again :)

[Rustynuts]

Thanks! Now I've just got to get the kid off the PC long enough to try. It's been setting with the cover off and a DVD drive hanging out the side for 3-days! Temps have been OK, so no cooling probs.

[Leonardo]

I´d use Norton Ghost for that... Get Hiren´s BootCD from...He doesn't need to. He's already got Acronis. UN, I have Ghost and Acronis. They both are excellent.

[Rustynuts]

Worked like a charm! Acronis automatically scales the new partitions based on drive size (up or down), or you can manually set them. Easy as pie. I was scared to try after my try at using DOS based Ghost a few years ago. Could not get it to work with SCSI opticals and RAID 0!

[maxwelltf]

How did you get Acronis to scale the new partition? I have Acronis True Image Home 10.0 and made an image of an existing 30GB laptop drive, then installed a newer bigger 60GB drive in the laptop, ran Acronis from a bootable CD and restored "disks or partitions" and it did not resize the partition to fill the new hard drive. I ended up with a 30gb partition on a 60gb drive. Not what I was looking for. I then tried restoring the image using the "specified file and folders" to the new drive which results in the new drive being 60gb (good) but it won't boot from the 60gb drive (bad). It comes up with "NTLDR is missing". I suppose this is because the 60GB drive does not have a proper MBR or something like that - or perhaps it's because all the restored files on the 60gb drive are all 1 extra folder deep - they are all installed in a folder called "Drive (C: )" rather that at the root level of the drive. Is there a way to correct this or add proper MBR files to the new drive so it will boot and my work will be finished? OR is there a way to get Acronis True Image Home 10 to resize the partition during the restore "disks or partitions" process??

[Your Amish Daddy]

I'd just use partition magic to resize it.

[maxwelltf]

you can do that with data stored on it and it doesnt affect the data?

[Butters]

You can also just use an IDE to SATA adapter... Good if you are trying to save the rest of your HD's to work on a new MB.

If there is a CompUSA in your area and its still in operation, you might be able to pick one up fairly cheap.

[Your Amish Daddy]

No, Partition Magic is pretty straightforward and useful. You can extract the image or whatever normally and get you 30gb partition, and then use Partition Magic to extend that partition and whamzilla, done.

[Thrax]

Don't pay for partition magic: http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/

[Your Amish Daddy]

Awesome. I didn't know they made such a critter.