Steve said:
The software that Western Digital provides is by Acronis. The original HD
has a partition of about 10Gb that contains the Restore files for the PC and
I want to keep that onto the new HD. Not sure if the software will do that
or if I have to prepare it myself. And since I cannot see the new HD in
Explorer, I don't have a drive letter assigned to it. That makes it another
confusing issue for me. Thanks for the input, Steve T.
The very first thing to do, is make sure you understand what capabilities
your machine has, and what partitions and partition types might be present
on the old drive. This article, for example, covers some of the cases
for a Dell machine.
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm
What to do, and how to proceed, may vary from case to case. I consider
some of what is described in the previous article, to be "over the top" in
terms of cleverness, and should never have been done in equipment
intended to be used by home users.
You could, for example, start with a tool like this, to look at the current
primary partition table entries. The partition type field, may hint
at what is on your disk. (Disk Management shows much the same info,
but if Disk Management can't name something, PTEDIT32 may help you
identify if something is there.) Looking at your computer documentation,
for some of the keywords used on the Goodells web site, may also
give some idea what is hiding on there.
Download and unzip PTEDIT32.zip from here.
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/
You can see an example of a Dell disk here. The three partition types
here are DE, 07, and DB. The DB could be a 0B (FAT32) partition with
the letter D slapped on it. The DE could be a Dell utility. The 07 is NTFS.
If you double-click the partition type field, while using PTEDIT32, it
will display a table of partition types. The Dell types won't be
documented in there, but the "standard" partition types will. So at
least 07 would be identified with some authority.
http://www.vistax64.com/attachments...n-partiton-recovery-dell-xps-420-dell-tbl.gif
In a lot of cases, a program like Linux "dd" could be used to copy
the info on the other disk, regardless of partition types or tricks.
(That is how I make exact copies of things.)
The exception to that, would be the case of a disk that uses an HPA
or Host Protected Area. Dealing with that would take more work. Even
some of the utilities that specialize in erasing user disks (used
for hard drive recycling), make no guarantees that they can erase
a disk which has an active HPA. So dealing with HPAs can be more complicated
than most tools are prepared for. (The BIOS may prevent a user from
working with HPAs, in the name of security. It is dangerous for a computer
to be unprotected against the formation of HPAs, so the BIOS usually
closes that door on home machines. That is to prevent malware
from making the whole disk invisible inside an HPA. And that is
why some tools will warn that they cannot guarantee they'll be
able to complete their mission, if the BIOS has already closed
the door.)
So while using Acronis to capture the C: partition should work
without too much sweat, getting every detail of the copying of
your disk right, is going to depend on just how complicated the
setup happens to be.
Paul
