Prepping a hard drive

[kenner]

I bought a new laptop hard drive that I want to use for cloning the current drive. What prep work do I need to do before attempting the cloning software? Am I correct that the new, cloned drive could be used interchangeably in the laptop?

[jlreich]

What prep work do I need to do before attempting the cloning software?
If you clone it or restore an image to it everything with the exception noted below should be as the original. No formatting or anything should be required. But you do need a way to get the cloned image onto the new drive. Either by using an external USB adapter and cloning directly, or by making an image to CD/DVD's or external USB drive, swapping the new drive in and restoring to it.

Once you figure which way you are going to do it it should work just as the other drive with maybe the possibility of needing to mark the partition active so it will boot from it. Depending on what software you use and how you use it it may do it automatically, or you may need to do it manually.

Am I correct that the new, cloned drive could be used interchangeably in the laptop
Yep, you should be able to swap either drive in and boot to it.

[kenner]

I installed the new drive in the enclosure. XP sees it just fine under MY Computer. The problem is I only have a really old version of Acronis. When I attempt to choose cloning, I get the error message that there isn't a second drive to clone to. Is this because my software is so old or did I miss a step?

[jlreich]

I am not particularly familiar with Acronis, but you are likely not going to be able to clone directly to a USB drive, you should be able to "image" to/from one but not clone. Probably the easiest solution is to make an image to CD/DVD, then put the new drive in and restore to it.

If Acronis does not support USB at all then it is likely the version is too old. BootIt NG (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm) has a free trial that can do the imaging/restoring and supports USB. It may even clone directly to a USB drive though I have never attempted it so I am not certain.

To use the free trial it is best to boot from the CD, when it asks to install click cancel and that will take you into maintenance mode. From there you can go into partition work and do the imaging/cloning. It is worth reading through the manual to get a feel on how to do it before leaping in. Also I have used BiNG for years and can help with any specific questions.

[Sylvander]

If I remember right, I used my copy of "Acronis True Image 11" [ATI11] to make an image of my neighbors' WinXP partition, saved to his new 500GB external USB HDD.
Shortly after I successfully restored that image to his internal HDD.
The "Seagate Disk Wizard" is a rebranded FREE version of ATI. [I have that too]

Acronis True Image is certainly good, but my inclination is to use some Puppy Linux and its natively included "Puppy Universal dd" [Pudd], which of course is able to access USB devices and more.
Pudd doesn't have such a fancy GUI, and it only includes track0 if you image the whole of the drive, but then in Puppy you get SO MUCH MORE than just an imaging program, and it all fits on a CD, or it can be run from a USB Flash Drive, or wherever. :cool: