Help!! Acronis issue with service partition

[jkbrand]

I bought the 7K200 drive to replace the 100GB drive on my x60.

I used Acronis 10 to clone the original drive to the larger drive (mounted in the ultrabay).

When the operation concluded nearly two hours later, I had two 100GB partitions (PRELOAD and SERVICE).

Inasmuch as the SERVICE partition on the orginal was but 4GB (approximate), I figured I'd reassign the space on the now-larger SERVICE partition to the PRELOAD partition.

I removed the original HDD, replaced it with the newly cloned drive, and rebooted.

I tried two options in PartitionMagic and neither worked. First I tried to "resize" the SERVICE partition. I was willing to keep the SERVICE partion at what I thought was a generous 5GB so that I could reclaim the other 95GB. That didn't work. Next, I tried to "create new partition." Acronis asked where to take space from; I chose the SERVICE partition, but it wouldn't allow it.

At the beginning of one of those operations (I can't remember which) PartitionMagic reported the Current, Minimum, and Maximum sizes for the SERVICE partition. The values shown for each of the three sizes were identical (approx 100GB). Any attempt to change the size for the new partition resulted in an error message. It was clear that no resizing (from that option, at least) was allowable.

Did I perhaps miss an option in the cloning operation that could have limited the new SERVICE partition's size to the original?? If so, I'm willing to re-clone if I knew where that option exists. Or, is there something I'm doing wrong in the partition resizing (or creating) that'll allow me to dissociate that 95GB from the SERVICE partition?

BTW, from other posts I'd read on the location of the SERVICE partition, I did specify that the new partition should precede the SERVICE partition, thus preserving the SERVICE-partition location as the last partition on the drive....

Any help is appreciated.....

(modified to reflect that it was PartitionMagic I was using to resize the SERVICE partition, not Acronis.....)

[jkbrand]

For those who might experience the same (or similar) difficulty noted above in upgrading their HDD via Acronis cloning, this is what I learned.

If you let Acronis default in its cloning operation (after explicitly stating to it what your source and target drives are), you must select "manual" mode ("automatic" is the default).

Sometime later you will be be given the choice of cloning using their "proportional" algorithm or "as is". "Proportional" is the
default; you want "as is."

It appears that an unallocated partition of about 95GB will reside on the target HDD, which should allow "resizing" of the PRELOAD
partition--using PartitionMagic--to embrace that unallocated portion.

Jeff

[timendres]

Wow. Thank you for posting this information.

Have you looked into what you get if you pre-partition the new drive to be 190GB/10GB and them use Acronis to restore? I am wondering if you can get Acronis to honor the partitions and not resize them.