Transfer hard drive by Acronis True Image?

Question

I have Acronis True Image 2009 and want to upgrade my internal hard drive from 80GB to 500GB.

Has anyone tried the cloning process and did it work?

I'm a little hesitant as I'm afraid something "bad" will happen.

Answer 1

To transfer the system, you must first install the disk in the computer . If your computer doesn’t have a bay for another hard disk, you can temporarily install it in place of your CD drive or use a USB 2.0

connection to the external target disk. If that is not possible, you can clone a hard disk by creating a disk image and restoring it to a new hard disk with larger partitions.

There are two transfer modes available: automatic and manual.

In the automatic mode, you will only have to take a few simple actions to transfer all the data, including partitions, folders and files, to a new disk, making it bootable if the original disk was bootable.

There will be only one difference between these disks – partitions on the newer disk will be larger. Everything else, including the installed operating systems, data, disk labels, settings, software and everything else on the disk, will remain the same.

Answer 2

I have used Acronis True Image 8 to clone disks - yes, it's three years old, have used it for three years. I have never installed in into Windows, I simply use the CD as a boot disk and use it there.



Your hard drives have a serial number that the BIOS and Acronis will read. Make sure you know which serial number goes with which drive. Since the two drives are quite different in size you will know which is the original drive and which is the clone drive. It's a real problem if the two drives are identical except for their serial number, which was my problem!



When you clone, the program will ask you about partitioning the clone drive, after all your source drive is only 80 GB. Maybe you will choose to expand the partition to completely fill the 500 GB drive, or maybe you will choose to make an 80 GB partition and use the remaining 420 GB to make one or more additional partitions.



When you clone write down the decision you make, because if you don't like the results, you can simply do the cloning process over and change the partitioning to what you want it to be.



Now for the other problem, let's say you have 60 GB of OS, programs, and data on the 80 GB drive. It can take over a half hour to transfer that much data from one drive to the other. While the IDE can have 100 MB/s data transfer rates and the SATA I can have 150 MB/s data transfer rates and the SATA II can have 300 MB/s data transfer rates, that is how fast the interface can transfer data. Reading data off one hard drive and writing data to the other hard drive, I have found, actually runs 30 MB/s to 45 MB/s for huge files, because the speed of the rotating platters are the limitation to the data transfer rate.



I use Acronis True Image 8 more often to make image backups, which allows me to recover from installations of stupid software or buggy software, as well as not worry about spyware or crimeware infestations. I just pull out the USB external hard disk and put the Acronis CD in the drive and reboot the computer, and select the image I want to restore and go!



I have had excellent results with the external hard drives that require their own power supply that is plugged into the AC outlet.



I have had extremely slow results with the little portable hard drives that get their power from USB ports, I've used the Maxtor Mini and a Verbatim. These two drives were very slow when Acronis was writing an image file, and very slow when Acronis was reading an image file, slow as in 10 MB/s or slower.



These same drives, when used in a Windows environment, can transfer files at 20 MB/s, so I don't know why there is such a huge difference.

Answer 3

I haven't used the 2009 version but I have used a previous version of True Image to do it and it worked perfectly. Basically what you'll do is install your new hard drive as a second drive ("slave" drive in your computer). It should show up as something like Drive D or E. Your old primary ("master" drive) is probably Drive C. Once you have your 2 drives set up in your computer, you run the cloning option and instruct it to clone your Primary Drive to your new secondary drive. Once it's finished, you turn your computer off, remove your original drive and put your new drive in it's place and (and set the jumpers so that it is now the "master" drive). Then boot up and everything should be exactly the way it was, except on a bigger drive. If anything goes wrongs, you still have your original drive intact and you can just reinstall it and try again. Once you're satisfied that everything worked, you could keep install your old drive as a new secondary drive and use it for backups, additional storage space or whatever.



If you're not familiar with installing 2 drives in your computer and setting them up as a master & slave (primary & secondary) drive, try a google search and you'll find plenty of websites that give instructions how this is done. Also your new drive should have come with some instructions that explain how to install it as a "slave" drive and/or a "master" drive by setting the jumpers on the drive in the correct positions.



Bottom line is, the cloning works great and since it doesn't alter your original drive, if anything does go wrong, you can just reinstall your original drive and try something else.

Answer 4

The usual advice is to create a backup before trying anything dangerous, but you already have a backup in TI, so the gremlins will not be tempted.



While TI works well, you might also want to consider the transfer software that generally comes with new drives.