Let the fun begin...

[Whyzman]

The kids maxed-out the 20 GB harddrive with i-tunes and video...

I purchased an new 500 GB PATA drive and used Western Digitial's version of Acronis to clone the old drive onto the new.

Everything appeared to go well and I left the computer running. I know that Service Pack 3 had been trying to update but it had not been able to before due to lack of space on the 20 GB.

Now, the computer has been running for hours with "Updates are being installed (1 of 1)" along with a warning not to turn off or unplug my computer as it will turn off automatically once the updates are completed...

What has me concerned, besides the frozen in time thing I mentioned, is that I did not format the 500 GB, I just followed the Acronis cloning instructions. I did manually resize the 3 existing partitions since it was intent on proportionally resizing them. I now have some unallocated areas on the drive following each of the 3 partitions. These I hope I will be able to move and create another partition by combining them.

So, during the cloning process, is formatting being included because it's what was done on the old 20 GB?? Since the old partitions have been enlarged beyond their original size, is that "new space" on each of the old partitions actually unformatted and unusable?

I used FAT when doing these originally and am running Windows XP.

Should I just redo the process after formatting the 500 GB and go from there??

[Whyzman]

Checking the Western Digital site I also found these limitations for FAT 32 ... do they still exist?

Limitations under Windows 2000/XP/Vista:
A FAT32 partition cannot be created that is larger than 32GB.
A file cannot be transferred to a FAT32 partition if the file is larger than 4GB.
FAT32 file system performs more slowly than NTFS (Windows) or Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus, Mac).

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Yes x3....

[Whyzman]

I figured so...but Acronis did not pick up on that when I manually resized the partitions larger than the limits...

[classicsoftware]

The Western Digital software usually does everything. Partition, format, transfer, the whole works. Did you remove the old hard drive and replace it with new drive?

[Paul Komski]

In fact FAT32 volumes can theoretically be as large as 8TB if 32KB clusters are used but since the normal sector size is 512bytes the actual maximum is, to all intents and purposes, 2TB; some four times larger than your 500 GB drive.

The maximum file size is also dependent on the cluster size and the theoretical maximum is 4GB whereas in practice the functional maximum is usually 2GB.

The 32 gig volume size limitation under WinXP etc is a limitation of the Win2K/XP etc formatting utility and not of the file system. You can create and format very much larger FAT32 partitions from both DOS and Win98 or with resizing utilities.

A clone + resize operation is not a direct formatting operation as a rule. The partitions are cloned and then resized. If you have unallocated space after you have finished that Acronis wont "clean up" I suggest using BiNG to move/slide/resize them to the values you want.

[Whyzman]

Yes, I did remove the 20 GB drive. It is still intact and I could redo the clone. I'm wondering the wisdom of changing to NTFS at this juncture??

If I elect to go the "re-clone" route, I think I will allow Acronis to just do its deal and not try to initially readjust the partition sizes.

If I can use BiNG following the clone to move things around that would then be good.

Any idea what could be causing the endless "Updates are being installed (1 of 1)" to be going on??

[Whyzman]

One other question... Is WinXP capable of handling the 500 GB harddrive or is it usually necessary with these older motherboards to have to look for a more updated BIOS??

[classicsoftware]

The system should have no trouble handling the drive. As long as your OS partition is at least the same size as the drive you are cloning you should have no problems. I have done this literally hundreds of times. Change it to NTFS after you restore the info....

[jlreich]

If you are going to redo the clone boot to the old drive and turn off automatic updates before hand. That way you can go and do them manually overnight after things are setup and known to be working correctly.

[Whyzman]

I've been able to boot up with the cloned drive and it has tried to update. I did it manually, downloading Service Pack 3...but it fails. It has tried it twice without success.

I'm thinking that I'll re-clone get the partitions setup on the new drive...get whatever needs to be salvaged from the C: and then reload Windows. For some reason it doesn't seem capable of installing the Service Pack. Perhaps from earlier when the drive did not have enough space and it tried it may have screwed something up...

But, I think I'll give it a go and try the manual update. I'm gonna let Acronis do its thing this time without interference and then BiNG it later...

[Paul Komski]

One other question... Is WinXP capable of handling the 500 GB harddrive or is it usually necessary with these older motherboards to have to look for a more updated BIOS??WinXP from SP1a onwards should have no problem with drives over 127GB. If Acronis or XP or BiNG can see the full 500 GB then there should be no BIOS limitation.