How best to "clone" new install?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Homer
  • Start date Start date
H

Homer

I just ordered a new system with Vista Biz pre installed. Got a pretty
good deal but...it only has an 80 GB drive. I want to clone the drive to a
250 SATA I have prior to even turning on the new system. How best to do
this?
Acronis? What Version(s)?

Thanks..

JohnS
 
With Vista's new security features you probably won't be able to do that at
all. The hard drive ID has probably been recorded by Vista during quality
control testing by the computer manufacturer, and when Vista boots it will
find a different hard drive ID and shut down; thinking that its on a cloned
system.

Cloning the drive will probably fail as well, Vista has an enhanced NTFS
that's different from XP, and posts here and elsewhere report garbled or
wrecked file backups using Acronis and their ilk.

Vista's SATA driver implementation is reported as being poor as well,
chipset manufacturers haven't got them right yet. SATA drives in some
systems are running at PATA speed.

I'd leave the 80 gig as your main drive and use the 250 gig SATA as a
storage drive.
 
I have successfully used Acronis True Image to image and restore and also to
clone hard drives with Vista installed many times. I used Acronis True Image
9.1 booting from the recovery CD. TI 10 is Vista compatible and should work
from within Vista.
 
I have successfully used Acronis True Image to image and restore and
also to clone hard drives with Vista installed many times. I used
Acronis True Image 9.1 booting from the recovery CD. TI 10 is Vista
compatible and should work from within Vista.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the replies. Guess it won't hurt to try and clone via Acronis
10. It is just that usually a cheap system comes with a crappy HDD,
probably a Samsung or whatever and I wanted to start off with a good
quality SATA that I have and am not using.

JohnS
PS..I will let you know the results in about a week.
 
Homer said:
Thanks for the replies. Guess it won't hurt to try and clone via Acronis
10. It is just that usually a cheap system comes with a crappy HDD,
probably a Samsung or whatever and I wanted to start off with a good
quality SATA that I have and am not using.

JohnS
PS..I will let you know the results in about a week.
Click to expand...


I sell and support a lot of hard drives and systems. Samsung drives are one
of my preferred brands. They are very quiet and have very few problems.
 
I just ordered a new system with Vista Biz pre installed. Got a pretty
good deal but...it only has an 80 GB drive. I want to clone the drive to a
250 SATA I have prior to even turning on the new system. How best to do
this?
Acronis? What Version(s)?
Click to expand...

I'd use BING (www.bootitng.com) after booting this from CDR, and after
NOT installing it as boot manager, but going into Partition
Maintenance.

It's important that XP or Vista never see both HDs with the same
installation at the same time, else drive letters get mixed up.

I know the above works with XP; dunno if Vista has new wrinkles.

The other ("proper") way is to download WAIK and use those tools to
Sysprep the installation, then boot WinPE, then use ImageX to harvest
the installation as an image, then repeat with new HD to apply that
image. That's overkill for what you want to do, but would solve
issues if the target hardware was different and you wanted a new PC
that didn't clash with the old one.


--------------- ---- --- -- - - - -
Click to expand...
Saws are too hard to use.
Be easier to use!
 
I used Acronis True Image 10 to make an image of my hard drive 3 days ago,
and I had no problem with it. The one thing you want to watch for is when it
asks you to create a Secure Zone, it gets little confusing, but other than
that, it worked wonder for me.

Oh! Another suggestion, before you clone your hard drive, defrag it.
 
Personally, I use ImageX to do the backup/restore. It's fairly easy to use,
and since it does a file-based copy instead of a sector-based, it's
non-destructive.

You could download the WAIK and go that route to create an unattended
installation, sysprep, and so on, but since you aren't changing hardware to
any huge degree, this is probably overkill.

The ImageX route is fairly quick, painless, and should get you a good image
onto the new drive in fairly short order. The only caveat to this is that
you will need to tell the new hard drive to be active and have the boot
sector installed. You can do that with either bootsect or simply placing the
Vista DVD in the drive after the move and telling it to repair. It will
detect that you have an invalid boot partition and fix it for you.

Good luck!
 
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