Acronis True Image on 600X

[w9cw]

Hello,

I'm installing a new 40GB HD to replace the original 12GB in my 600X. I plan to use Acronis True Image 8.0 to clone the original drive.

I'm planning to temporarily install the new HD in the UltraslimBay port as a slave drive, and then use True Image to clone the drive. Since True Image can be used in several ways, should I use the Clone mode of True Image, or Image mode to move everything to the new HD? I'm a bit confused by the User Guide for my application. It appears I should use the Clone mode.

And, is my methodology correct on installing the new HD in the UltraslimBay as a slave drive, cloning the original C: drive, and then moving the new HD to the C: drive port, and reconfiguring it as master? I've read where the MBR may be a problem, and I wanted to get some feedback before proceeding.

Any input on this would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Don

[wolfman]

I used acronis true image to clone my 30 gig 4200 rpm to my current 40 gig 7200 rpm. I used the clone option and it worked fine. Last week a friend of mine did the same thing - 20 gig 4200 rpm->60 gig 7200 rpm. In both cases we used the ultrabay 2000 second HDD adapter and cloned from the primary to the secodary. Acronis doesn't require you to know if it is primary or secondary, or on which IDE channel the source is on, etc. It's graphical and lets you select the source and destination drive in the clone wizard by label/size. Was a snap. Good luck.

[storage_man]

TI 8 should do the job. But be careful. If your going to clone to another internal disk, make sure you remove the original drive and replace it with the new one before you boot that machine again. What I'm saying is that if you clone your current dirve and then boot to the current drive without removing the new drive, WINDOWS will disable the cloned drive and it will not boot again with out a lot of work. Have fun it works I've done it twice with no problems. Acronis makes a good product.

Storage_man

[jcrkelly]

To you folks using Acronis -- are you un-hiding the IBM partition first? I'd like to upgrade my X31's 20gb to a new 60gb drive, keeping that partition and possibly even adding another partition so that I can dual-boot to a Linux flavor on occassion.

Any suggestions for that?

[storage_man]

jcrkelly

As far as the Reovery partition goes, it is the worst senerio that you could invent. ie: If i said "FORMAT C: and then said YES, I could recover my original backup from IBM but not any of my data. Oh by the way if your hard disk dies you have no recovery. The recovery partition is GONE>

What I'm saying is that its much better to order the reovery CD's / DVD's from IBM (or build them depending on the thinkpad system) than to rely on the recovery partition on your current harddisk.

No I have not backed up the original recovery partition from my original harddisk in my thinkpad. I ordered the CD's from IBM (@ the time it was $35+shipping). I then Deleted the partition and was able to use my total orginal 20gb harddisk. Since then I needed my CD's once after a failed SP2 upgrade. I have also upgraded to a 40gb HD and still have no recovery partition. I only use the CD's for major recovery. I use Acornis TI - 8 to image on a weekly basis to an external USB 2.0 harddisk and I perform every other month a CLONE backup to a drive that I put into my ultra slot. This is in-case I have a major failure where I can't recover from the Image Backups. I hope this helps

Storage_man

[farna]

Once you have your system the way you want it make an image of the drive and copy to CDs. TI8 allows you to do that. I don't know if it makes a boot floppy or the first CD is bootable, but believe the later.

I just ordered Norton Ghost 2003 because I had a problem with a Linux based imaging program (partimage). It worked as it should, and even restroed, but it does something strange to the partition table and/or MBR. I restored the image to a larger drive but couldn't get the system to recognize the increased space! The documentation states this is what partimage does, and to use a partition editor such as Partition Magic or parted (a Linux utilitity) to change it. Only problem is neither would work! Even FDISK saw the drive as the large size with one partition, but Win98 saw it as the original smaller drive! I tried everything, finally ended up formatting the drive and loading everything from scratch. Luckily I'd just built the system and didn't have any data to lose. But that's spooked me from using Linux based software. I don't recall formatting the drive before making the image, that is likely the problem. But I don't want to run into that problem again! It could be that the imaging software just doesn't get along good with the IBM disk controller.

[w9cw]

Over the weekend, I replaced my original 600X 12GB with the new Toshiba 40GB 5400RPM drive using Acronis True Image 8. It couldn't have been easier. I simply used the Clone mode in TI8, and it was an absolute no brainer! Once the cloning process was finished, I moved the new drive from the Utraslimbay to the hard drive caddy of the original drive. I don't think anything I've ever done with computers in the last 20 years was as easy as this. Kudos to Acronis for such a fine product.

And, thanks to everyone who posted helpful advice.