Imaging and Swapping HDD

GunJack

Bear with me on this one guys, but help & advice required....

A pc has a C: drive 40GB (24GB used, compressed) and an E: drive 80GB (15 GB used, non-compressed). C: has Windows, Program Files, etc. on it.

There is also an external 500 GB HDD, not touched.

If I were to Acronis image both the C: and E: drives to the external HDD, reallocate the drive letters to make the 80GB the C: drive and the 40GB the E:drive, could I then restore the images so the 24GB compressed went onto the new 80GB C: drive and the 15 GB onto the 40GB E: drive ??

Any pitfalls to watch out for if I attempt this ?? I suppose what I'm thinking is if the windows and other programs will go through this process unscathed without corrupting and then enable me to de-compress the installation ???

Any advice welcomed

closed

This is a long winded way of doing it, but gives you two copies (one complete disk image + one system partition image, and a copy of e: files) in case something goes wrong. Make sure you have a bootable acronis cd before you start (you may wish to use this to create the images as well).

As you have plenty of space on the usb drive, image the whole drive/disk to the usb drive. (this includes c: and e and bootsector).

Then, create a directory on usb drive, and copy the e: drive data across manually.

As you have 2 copies of e: (copy to dvd as well if you want to be sure), delete the e: partition.

Then image the c: partition only to usb. Restore this image back to the disk, and manipulate the partition size at that point, then after booting, recreate e: manually, and copy the e: data back.

Alternatively, you could backup, and use disk partitioning tools to resize in-situ. Repartitioning would be much faster if you backup e: data manually, zap the partition, resize c:, the recreate and restore e: partition and data.

The compression on c: I assume is windows ntfs compression, in which case there should be no complications compression wise, assuming you have space to decompress everything after resizing.

Pitfalls, it could go wrong in many ways, acronis bug/limitation, usb drive fails, Linux CD fails in some way, so backup using different methods and media if you want to be safe

momoyama

closed wrote: »

Alternatively, you could backup, and use disk partitioning tools to resize in-situ.

I recently had a HD size issue and this was how I solved it. I used PartitionMagic. Be warned that it doesn't always work, so DO back up. It worked a dream for me, though.

GunJack

hanx guys....

just for clarification the internal drives are two separate ones, not 1x120GB partitioned

"This is a long winded way of doing it, but gives you two copies (one complete disk image + one system partition image, and a copy of e: files) in case something goes wrong."

my thoughts exactly, better to start off the process by having the two originals AND the two images as backup for each other:)

"The compression on c: I assume it windows compression, in which case there should be no complications compression wise, assuming you have space to decompress everything after resizing."

yes, it's window's own compression. I'm struggling to estimate, though, how much space is going to be needed when the 24GB is decompressed....any thoughts anyone ??

closed

In that case, image c: drive put it to one side until you have the replacement drive booting.

Backup and image e:, then swap the drive and restore the c image to the bigger drive.

When that is working, the copy the e: data back to the smaller drive.

depends on the data, estimate double the size. Windows should tell you the size on disk, and size.

GunJack

closed wrote: »

In that case, image c: drive put it to one side until you have the replacement drive booting.

Backup and image e:, then swap the drive and restore the c image to the bigger drive.

When that is working, the copy the e: data back to the smaller drive.

depends on the data, estimate double the size. Windows should tell you the size on disk, and size.

Exactly !! that's what I made a bit of a meal of in the original post hanx again guys