Preparing a new Hard Drive

polybear

Hi,
I've just purchased a new (bigger) Hard Drive for my laptop. My existing HD is NTFS. I'm planning to remove the existing HD and fit it to an external enclosure, then connect it to my desktop and clone the drive using Acronis. I'll then fit the new HDD into the enclosure and download the cloned data (basically everything including the Vista operating system) from the desktop via Acronis. Then I can fit this HDD into my laptop and hopefully everything should be fine...

My questions are:
1. Does the above plan sound ok?
2. What, if any thing do I need to do to the new HDD prior to use please? The (very basic) instructions for the enclosure mention:

"For the new HDD, before installing it into the enclosure, please partition and format the HDD with FAT16 or FAT32 file system. If your HDD format is NTFS or UNIX, please make sure your HDD is reformatted with FAT16 or FAT32 before the connection".

I'm a bit mystified by this - can someone explain (simply!) what I need to do please?
Thanks

Brian

amcluesent

TBH, I think you'd have more luck connecting the new HD in it's caddy to the laptop, then booting Acronis off the CD-ROM and cloning the laptop disk and grow the partition. That's how it's designed to work anyhow.

As you're cloning the disk, the new one doesn't need formatting.

polybear

Thanks for the reply. The problem is that Acronis is installed on the desktop, not the laptop. But it's the laptop HDD I want to clone to a new bigger HDD

Brian

Hammyman

You've got a desktop computer? Well save yourself a few quid. If the laptop is a SATA one, the interface is the same as a desktop SATA drive. Merely insert the laptop drive into the desktop, image it onto the desktop hard drive with Acronis, swap it for the new laptop hard drive and restore the image to the new drive OR if there's insufficient space on the desktop drive for the image file, shove both laptop drives in the machine.

polybear

Thanks for the reply. Could you run that by me again please, only slower and with smaller words - you lost me! :rotfl:

Brian

closed

try creating an acronis boot disk, then clone direct from laptop to usb caddy

polybear

Many thanks for all the replies. I downloaded Seagate Discwizard from the Seagate website onto my laptop (free download; this is a utility which can be used for copying all data on a HDD and transferring it to a new HDD - one of the drives does need to be a Seagate/Maxtor drive though. Discwizard is a very cut-down version of Acronis, incidentally). Then I fitted the new bigger seagate drive into an external caddy and connected it to the laptop. I had to enable/prepare the drive by going into Disc Management (easy); there was no need to format the drive etc. I then used Discwizard to copy the entire existing drive (incl. Vista Operating System) onto the new HDD, via a USB port. The old drive was then removed from the laptop and replaced with the new bigger HDD; the old drive was stored in the external caddy.

All in all, very painless and easy to do - thanks for the advice.
Brian