New 7200 Drive: how do I get R&R to copy my old drive?

[tommy d]

Dudes,

I just bought a hitachi 7200 100gb SATA drive and I don't want to rebuild my system b/c it is working so sweet now: what I want to do is to simply copy the old drive including the service partition.

Context:
I have the latest R&R images on a USB drive and the new drive (7200) working nicely in the UltraBay SATA adapter (I want the the 7200 to be System and the 5400 Data)

Have, but have not installed: Acronis 9.0 and Ghost 9.0.

I know I could go the clone route but I am unsure how to deal with FAT32 service partition, I usulaly just blow these things away at the first oppurtunity but I like R&R because it reminds to backup...which I have become quite lazy about.

I would very much appreciate any insight from past experience in this matter.

Thanks in advance,

Tommy D

[tommy d]

OK, I figured out a way to do it with R&R.

Using the cd restore set to bring the new drive to factory load, then update from R&R 3.0 --> 4.0 not frogetting that migration assistant must also be updated and then use my R&R image to overwrite factory load.


In this manner, I will maintain the service partition and my latest build.

If you forsee any problems, holla. I wont be doing this until the weekend because of work constraints.

Thanks,

tommy d

[bontistic]

I could help you with the clone route using Ghost 9.0 if you decide to use this route. It will take about less than 30 minutes to do a full disk to disk clone of a 100GB drive including both OS and the Hidden Partition.

Though it will be slightly different if you are running Vista now as you will need a Vista installation DVD afterwards.

[tommy d]

Thanks Bontistic!

I went with Acronis 9.0 booting the full version from USB floppy - worked fine in about 35 minutes. Creating the 8 floppy boot disks took longer than the clone.

The R&R factory restored failed on disk (1/5) "cyclical redundancy error" making the IBM supplied restore disks perfectly useless.

I had to use the USB floppy because the Ultra-Bay drive was housing the old 5400 drive in the SATA adapter and couldn't boot to the CD.

I'm still trying to get a bootable USB flash drive that works with Acronis 9.0 but have not yet been successful. When I figure this out I'll post an .ISO. This will make things much easier for others in the future.

tommy d

[bontistic]

Great to hear that it worked for you.

There is a tool that you can use to make your USB drive bootable.
Click here for the Utility.

Alternatively, I think I did it by booting off a USB floppy disk while the USB drive is inserted and no other HDs present. I did a format /s on the USB drive and set it as an active partition in fdisk. Although I think the utility that I linked above looks much simpler.

[tommy d]

Duh!

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/support/kb/?aid=388

[ymemuser]

Great to hear that it worked for you.

There is a tool that you can use to make your USB drive bootable.
Click here for the Utility.

Alternatively, I think I did it by booting off a USB floppy disk while the USB drive is inserted and no other HDs present. I did a format /s on the USB drive and set it as an active partition in fdisk. Although I think the utility that I linked above looks much simpler.

Thanks