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Acronis TrueImage help

fustercluck

fustercluck

Diamond Member
I got a couple of hard drives that have been a little wishy washy. I bought a 400GB HD so I could move everything (including windows) over to it, and use my 2 old drives as backup drives (to backup files onto). I'm not sure what the best way to do this is, I have Acronis True Image so I plan on using that, I just don't know how to do it exactly. The main part I'm worried about is getting windows over to my new HD without screwing up anything. I basically want to fool my system into thinking windows never changed. Can I just clone my entire other two old drives to my 400GB drive and boot into windows using only the 400GB?

The other thing I'm worried about is if I have all my HDs in and my computer detects 2 installations of windows xp, will that mess up anything? If so, how can I delete my old install of windows (assuming the clone works and I can boot into XP off my 400GB HD)?

This is probably less complicated than I think, but it's got me confused. What'll be the easiest way to go about doing this? Thanks.
 
Cloning refers to an exact copy of one hd onto another, so you'd only clone your current boot hd onto the new one, which is indeed the best way to transfer everything from one boot drive to your new 400gb drive. This will maintain your windows installation/activation etc. when you boot to the new hd (windows will recognize the hd as 'new hardware', 'install it', and ask you to reboot, but nothing else will essentially change.) Once you've cloned one hd to the new 400gb disk, use that 400gb hd as your boot disk, and manually copy data from the second old hd onto a partition in the new one. If you have all 3 hd's hooked up to the computer at once, and multiple hd's have windows system partitions (boot partitions, which in this case you do), you'd select in your bios which gets priority to be your boot drive.

Just don't delete any data from your older hd's until you know the 400gb drive is up and running and booting properly into windows.
 
Thanks. I cloned my old windows drive over to my new 400gig but now i'm not quite sure what to do. I want to use the 400GB as the boot disk, but I'm not sure how to make it the primary drive. I can't select it as a boot device in the bios. I currently have all 3 drives hooked up. The 500 GB is SATA btw, the other two are ATA 133...or something like that.
 
Cool. There must be a way within the bios to set drive priority. I'm not familiar with that board, but in mine there is a place to select the boot priority for the system (ie floppy, then cd drive, then harddrive), and there is also a harddrive boot priority setting to list the attached hd's in the desired sequence. If you can't find such a setting (and don't get assistance in this thread) I'd suggest heading over to Motherboards and asking there, where you'll be sure to find someone with the same board or similar.
 
Thanks, got it up and working now. Hopefully backing up will be easy.

Edit: Trying to backup my 80gig to my 400gig didn't go well, got a blue screen of death almost as soon as it started backing up the 80gig. I had to do a backup because to clone Acronis requires the destination drive to be formatted and not petitioned for some reason. Not sure how well windows is doing on the new drive either =/
 
Originally posted by: ropeadope
Thanks, got it up and working now. Hopefully backing up will be easy.

Edit: Trying to backup my 80gig to my 400gig didn't go well, got a blue screen of death almost as soon as it started backing up the 80gig. I had to do a backup because to clone Acronis requires the destination drive to be formatted and not petitioned for some reason. Not sure how well windows is doing on the new drive either =/
Click to expand...

Curious for future reference, how did you fix the correct boot priority, a bios setting?

If Im not mistaken you've cloned your 80 already to your 400, to boot from the 400 correct? Why are you cloning again, it will overwrite the data you just put on the 400 in order to boot. Is this the other drive that you wish to backup?

And when you cloned, which method did you use...the one that takes the source partitions and applies them proportionally...or applies them the exact size, leaving you with lots of extra space on your 400gb drive?
 
I have to manually set the 400gig as the priority in the bios most of the time, but sometimes it just boots up on its own. I haven't cloned/backed up my 80gig, only my other old 40 gig which had windows on it.

I cloned the only way which was possible...I don't remember what it was exactly.
 
Luckily I was finally able to backup my failing maxtor drive. But, it saved them in .tib files, which it always does, but I kind of wanted to just move everything over to the new drive, and not have it all archived in a single file. I could copy and paste but my computer says that would take 6+ hours when I start the transfer 😛 - Any faster way to "extract" the tib files onto the drive so all my backed up stuff isn't trapped in a single .tib file? Ahh this shit is confusing. Maybe I can try and do a backup again and somehow tell acronis not to bundle it all in one tib file but just to transfer it over.

Acronis hasn't been my favorite app so far, I'm wondering if there is any other similar software out there that I would like better.
 
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