Clone HD using Acronis

I'm planning to add a 1TB SATA HD to my PC, and intend to clone the existing 250GB Drive 0 using Acronis, which is already installed on the machine. I will then use Acronis to wipe the 250GB drive and use it as a third drive on the machine ( there is another 250GB data drive).

Is Acronis smart enough to scale up all the partitions to fill the 1TB or will Partition Magic have a few hours work afterwards to do this?

Do SATA drives have any of those fiddly little links to determine whether they are master or slaves, and if not, how does the system determine which is the master?

The system is running Windows XP.

Thanks for any advice - I'm a bit rusty on this!

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Bryn

I can't help with Acronis, but SATA drives are one per cable, so no fiddly bits to worry about. Windows will normaly use SATA1 for the boot device.

I would suggest not wiping the current drive0 until you know the new one is working correctly.

I've had generally poor experiences with doing this kind of thing with Acronis and Windows XP. I'm not going to blame Acronis exclusively because some of it may be due to limitations of Windows XP. Sometimes you end up with a poorer performing system.

I have to recommend a fresh installation of Windows for the best performance realistically.

Is it just one partition on the system or multiple? This is where you problems with expanding partitions start..

I have used Acronis for pure cloning from 70GB to 300GB or 150GB to 750GB drives without partitions. All worked fine.

When cloning a disk it is better to make a bootable CD and use that to clone as opposed to cloning Windows when it's actually running.

Thanks for the quick responses.

I have multiple partitions on the HD (i.e. about 6 virtual drives, one of which has Windows XP), hence the question about whether Acronis will expand each of the partitions or whether it will just leave 750GB unallocated.

How about the fiddly link thingies - don't they appear on SATA HDs? And how will I ensure the new disk is treated as master?

Yes I know I should ideally install XP from scratch, but now where did I put the motherboard drivers for my now-extinct motherboard? etc etc, not to mention the aggro of reinstalling all those many applications cluttering up the current HD This is not my super fast up to date PC; it's just the one I actually do everything on.

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Bryn

I had similar issues with one PC.

I ran teh Clone ... so I know I had copies of everything. Then went through and did various clean-ups, deleted caches, histories and temp files 0- a real massive "clear out". Then did a "windows repair" which sped things up. Followed that with updates to all major applications ... Another "clear out" and finally a Disk Defrag. The original HDD is still in store just in case and could act as a recovery if required.

check that the xp installation on the 250gb hdd has sata support added as xp didn't at one stage support sata .

I have performed this an number of times, but using an Acronis back up image stored on an external hard disc.

Having replaced my backed up hard disc with a new one I then boot from my Acronis rescue disc and restored the back up to the new disc. This way you do not have to copy / clone your disc from within Windows. If your new disc is on SATA 1 Acronis will complete the job properly.

Just occasionally you might find that your partition is still the original size of your old disc. You can put this right using disc management tools found in XP or W7 with having to format again.