Restoring image to my new hard drive with Acronis

[jmt356]

Is anyone familiar with replacing a hard drive with Acronis True Image 11 Home? Chapter 14 of the manual gives a good overview of “Transferring the system to a new disk,” which I used to clone my computer’s hard drive to an external hard drive, but I can’t find where in the manual it explains how to then get the image on the cloned hard drive on my new blank hard drive. I don’t want to install the new hard drive quite yet, because I suspect that I won’t be able to do anything with my laptop if it has a blank hard drive with no operating system installed. I also don’t have one of those gadgets that I could use to connect the new hard drive to my laptop and then write the image of my current hard drive on the new one. I need to install the new hard drive and then find a way to get the image on the cloned external hard drive on the new hard drive.

Thanks in advance for pointing me in the right direction.

[DaveA]

The only way I know of, is put the new drive in the machine. Boot to you True Image CD, and the restore image. Then this should give you a bootable machine into what you have today but using the new drive.

Hopefully you have this Image on a external USB drive that you can restore the image from.

[jmt356]

My version of Acronis didn't come wtih a CD. However, Acronis gives the option of making Acronis Rescue Media cd from the Acronis home page. Would that work?

[jmt356]

I think the Acronis Rescue Media cd is what you were referring to, DaveA.

It appears that cloning my external hard drive to my current hard drive does not work for the purpose of restoring my current hard drive's image to my new blank hard drive. For this, I have to create an Acronis backup archive of my current hard drive onto my external hard drive, install my new blank hard drive, boot to my Acronis Rescue Media cd, choose "Recovery," and choose the backup archive as my source file. If I just have a cloned external hard drive, Acronis doesn't know what to do with it in the Recovery tool. It asks me to select my archive and doesn't recognize all of the other files in the clone.

[DaveA]

Yes, you need to make the Rescue Media CD and then you should be able to restore a image. This same CD can be made from with in True Image. I know when I download and install a update, it always reminds me to make a new Bootable CD to do this restore.

I have never made a "Clone" of my drive, as when you restore it, the new drive will be the same size as the original. Then you have to expand the partition to the full size of the drive.
I have just used the standard back up image to restore a drive or restore the image to a new drive.

[Bigaldoc]

Just curious... How long have you been struggling with this problem? Seems like you've been posting about this for quite some time. Do you think it may be appropriate to get some "outside help" in this matter?

[jmt356]

I haven't been struggling with replacing my hard drive for a long time ... this is a new issue, the first time I have tried swiping out a hard drive for a bigger one. The issues you are probably thinking of are the crashed hard drive issues, which I have struggled with for many years, more than a decade. I used to buy a new laptop whenever a hard drive crashed, because getting Best Buy to replace a hard drive and copy all of the old data to the new cost around $400 and I could just get a new laptop for $100 more. I used to manually copy all of My Documents to an external hard drive every few weeks. Once though I had not backed up for a month so I had to get Best Buy to copy all of MyDocuments from the crashed hard drive for around $100.

I then got Acronis some years ago and ran incremental backups every week. When my computer crashed, I would buy a new one and then restore the most recent image of My Documents and Outlook pst's to the new laptop and lose only up to one week of work (if the computer crashed just before I was going to make a new backup).

Then I started investing in warranties so that every time my computer crashed, I would get it from repair, restore the image and in about an hour have my computer back the way it was before it crashed, though for some reason, this was not working with my HP Pavilion last year (I think it may have been because my image was corrupt, or maybe it was Acronis's fault).

But back to replacing the hard drive: for the Acronis Rescue Media to work, does it have to be made on the same laptop that it will be used on, or can it be made from any computer and then work on any other one?

[StuartR]

...for the Acronis Rescue Media to work, does it have to be made on the same laptop that it will be used on, or can it be made from any computer and then work on any other one?

If the two PCs use the same drivers then you may be able to restore the image, but you need the TrueImage Home Plus Pack of you want to restore to dissimilar hardware.

[Roderunner]

Hi JMT, doing what your asking about, is simple. Installing the new HDD is the harder part.
[1] create recovery cd, make a test image on the ext. hdd you intend using. Boot from the cd, choosing full version. Select recovery option, browse to the image just made if Acronis does not find it automatically. If its readable, stop, as you now know it will work.
[2] Make a folder on ext. hdd, name it C: drive. Make a full image to that folder. (dont use the CD)
[3] Do the same for other partition/s, in a folder of the partition/s name.
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Now fit your new hdd. NO formatting or partitioning is needed, Acronis will do it.
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[4] Boot from cd as above, select C: drive. As the hdd is larger, Acronis will give option to make size you want.
[5] Your other partition/s can be restored by using installed program.