[GTGDave]

I own a Dell E1505 laptop with an Hitachi 60GB HD. I wanted to image the drive to an external backup (Seagate 300GB) and then recover the image to a new Wester Digital 640GB HD. I have tried both Norton Ghost 15.0 and Acronis True Image (Western Digital Edition) with no success. I have tried this 3 times. Every time I image the drive (C:/ and D:/ which is named a backup drive created by Norton I believe), it images fine to the exterior HD. However, when I recover the image, it turns the new drive into a 58GB HD. Each time, the drive must be sent back to WD and ultimately to the factory, for low level formatting. I have spent about 40 hours with WD support (level 2) and there seems to be no way to image to a larger HD. I have even tried imaging directly to the new drive using a SATA to USB2.0 Adapter, still with no success. I have written zeros to the WD HD, but it still gets reported as a 58GB HD. Disk Management finds the drive (now unallocated at 58GB), but My Computer will not find it. I am running Win XP SP3. Each time when I receive the new drive, BIOS reports the drive correctly at ~610GB. I would like to image the drive and not spend another 40 hours reinstalling all my programs.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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Cloning to an external drive will always be hit-and-miss.
If you want to clone the installation to a new drive that will be going in the machine, the easiest thing to do is to connect both the 60Gb and the 640Gb together inside a desktop machine, and then use Ghost or Acronis or whatever to copy it that way. It'll be a lot quicker.

If you're only ending up with a 60Gb partition on the new drive, you're doing something wrong. You shouldn't also have to low-level format anything, nor send it back to Western Digital. What you're probably doing is not allowing Ghost or Acronis to resize the partitions to fit the new drive. In its default state, Acronis will simply copy a 60Gb part to a 60Gb part on the new drive, and to heck with the rest of it. In advanced mode you get the option to tell Acronis to dynamically resize the partitions, so your 60Gb should then turn into one that fills the entire of the new drive.

Edited by Neil Jones, 21 November 2010 - 03:20 PM.

[Neil Jones]

Cloning to an external drive will always be hit-and-miss.
If you want to clone the installation to a new drive that will be going in the machine, the easiest thing to do is to connect both the 60Gb and the 640Gb together inside a desktop machine, and then use Ghost or Acronis or whatever to copy it that way. It'll be a lot quicker.

If you're only ending up with a 60Gb partition on the new drive, you're doing something wrong. You shouldn't also have to low-level format anything, nor send it back to Western Digital. What you're probably doing is not allowing Ghost or Acronis to resize the partitions to fit the new drive. In its default state, Acronis will simply copy a 60Gb part to a 60Gb part on the new drive, and to heck with the rest of it. In advanced mode you get the option to tell Acronis to dynamically resize the partitions, so your 60Gb should then turn into one that fills the entire of the new drive.

Edited by Neil Jones, 21 November 2010 - 03:20 PM.