Installing new hard drive in Dell Laptop

Earl Foote · From: Houston, Tx, USA

My laptop is getting pretty old in computer years and I want to change the hard drive before it fails. I have Acronis Home 11.0 and I plan to image the original drive to a external usb drive and then restore that image to the new drive. The new drive is somewhat larger (original is 50MB, new one is 80MB). I want to use an image to keep from having to reload OS, reinstall applications, reactivate applications, and bla bla bla.

After I back up the image to the external usb drive and install the new hard drive in the laptop, how does the image get restored to the new drive? Does the Acronis CD load a temporary OS and drivers for the usb ports to facilitate the restore operation? I'm a little unclear on the restore part of this project. Since my existing drive still works fine, I have the luxury of experimenting with the new drive to see if everything works OK. The help files seem to suggest that I am right but they are not crystal clear and I am wondering if any of you have done this.

Wiz Feinberg · From: Mid-Michigan, USA

Earl;
Yes, the Acronis bootable CD contains a tiny Linux operating system and it has USB drivers. The recovery interface is graphical and is mouse-aware. You will install the new, larger hard drive, then power on to open the CD tray. Insert the bootable recovery disk and reboot into it. If the disk does not startup you may need to enter your BIOS and set the CD drive as boot drive #1.

Once in the Acronis recovery program you will locate the source, which is on your USB disk, then the destination, which is the unpartitioned new drive. There will be options available, one of which is to expand the image to fill the new disk. Use that option.

Be sure you select to restore the entire saved image, including the Master Boot Record/Boot Sector.

In about a half hour you should be up and running with the new boot disk.

If you experience any problems along the way, or afterward, post them here, or with Acronis Live Chat, or on the new official Acronis True Image support forum.
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Earl Foote · From: Houston, Tx, USA

Excellent Wiz! I figured you had been down this road before. My new drive will be in from Dell in a few days, I'll let you know how it goes.

Many thanks,
EF

Ken Lang · From: Simi Valley, Ca

I would be interested to know how it goes as well.
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Earl Foote · From: Houston, Tx, USA

No problem, I will let you know how it turns out.

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

Many Dell's also have a Recovery Partition and Diagnostic Partition. Back those up (back up the entire drive, not just the "C" partition.

The Recovery Partition will allow you to restore the PC without having to use the discs to reinstall.
On PC's with Windows XP, it's CTRL/F11 at initial boot to access the Recovery Partition.

John Cipriano · From: San Francisco

Edit: I was wrong about how Acronis works but I will leave up the dd info...

If you want to do it "the right way", boot to a linux disk, use dd (wikipedia page) to copy the drive bit for bit to an image file on an external drive, then swap internal drives and restore the image file to the internal disk. Finally you use something like gparted to grow the main partition so you get that extra 30 GB. You won't even have to reinstall Acronis! Very Happy

But dd is sort of an advanced (read: old-fashioned) tool and what I said about swapping the old drive back in should cover you if you ever need the old restore partition, and in all likelihood if your computer is borked you'll just be using Acronis to restore anyway.

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

I've used Acronis to backup my Dell Dimension E510 desktop's hard drive and it will copy all the partitions on the drive and it will restore all the partitions if you have to do a hard drive restore or if you want to install a larger hard drive.

My E510 came with XP Media Center and the restore worked with that. However, I upgraded to Vista and when a Dell drive is updated to a different OS, such as from XP to Vista it corrupts the Restore Partition and it can't be used, if a user wanted to restore the PC to the original OS.

John Cipriano · From: San Francisco

I looked around and I am reading that there is something in Acronis called "Startup Recovery Manager" which will wipe out the Dell bootloader, but you can elect not to install that part.

I misworded my post before, obviously it's possible to back up the restore partition if you said so and if you've done it. I was only talking about the bootloader, sorry if it seemed like I was second guessing you, Jack. Anyway I assumed Acronis always puts its own loader in the MBR but I guess you can turn that on or off.

I used to think grub was bad but at least you can edit the grub files without resorting to floppies and black magic Very Happy

Everybody with a Dell should have dsrfix and dsrcheck from goodells.net on a floppy somewhere. I have used dsrfix to fix Dells that wouldn't Ctrl+F11. Of course sometimes people wipe out the partition entirely and then you have to explain to them that they nuked their only clean copy of Windows.

Vista uses a new bootloader so like you say Jack it's not compatible with the XP restore partition and bootloader. But for people who've upgraded, they will have an upgrade disk, so they can do something like this:
http://www.vistarewired.com/2007/02/28/perform-a-clean-install-with-a-vista-upgrade-disc

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

I don't know which way would work. Dell uses a Symmantic restore version. But on the Dell users forum, the general concensus is that if the Dell recovery partition is corrupted, for whatever reason, there isn't any way to recover. There could be ways of doing it, but the most users if it's corrupted it's "done for".

John Cipriano · From: San Francisco

You're too fast, I found the answer and edited, didn't think you'd see it first Smile

I understand what Wiz was saying about moving the MBR now too. I had assumed it would have an Acronis loader but now I see that it's possible for it to have the Dell loader. So moving it would be quite useful.

I still like dd for this stuff...you don't have to think about what's actually on there, just copy the bits. Like making an ISO of a CD and then burning it to another disc. In fact I would use dd for CDs and DVDs if OS X's "Disk Utility" wasn't doing exactly that anwyay.

If your actual restore partition is corrupt then I doubt you can fix that. But if it's the bootloader then the stuff at goodells.net/dellrestore can fix that.

Again, just in case others are reading...like you say, Vista does mess up the loader for the DSR. And it says on goodells.net that dsrfix can't fix it for a Vista machine. So it's sort of one or the other. But if you have a Vista CD you don't need the DSR. The DSR is there because Dell is cheap Smile

Sorry to hijack, Earl. I think the short version is just what Wiz said, copy everything with Acronis, including the MBR and Dell restore partition. Let us know how it goes.

Earl Foote · From: Houston, Tx, USA

Hijack away! This is very interesting! Some of it is above my head but that's how I learn. I'm not sure that I saw a recovery or diagnostic partition but now that I know it is there I will be looking for it when I do the actual procedure. I won't be changing OS at least with this machine, I'm real happy with the way this machine is performing and I just want to get a few more years out of it by replacing the hard drive before it craps out. I have done a lot of work on this computer so I have become somewhat familiar with it's innards. I have added more memory to it which was easy and I have replaced the keyboard which was not so easy. I had to replace the keyboard because I spilled a beer on it. Mr. Green

Jeff Hyman · From: West Virginia, USA

Quick question: A dd image is a block-by-block image, not a file-by-file. Even with a new master boot record (which I assume creates the divvy table to recognize the larger hard drive)... how does a dd restore know about the bad-block-table on the new hard drive?.

John Cipriano · From: San Francisco

I shouldn't have said bit-for-bit, it's block-for-block. Also I hope it was clear by the quotes that I was sort of joking when I said dd was "the right way". Newer stuff like Ghost and partimage is easier to use and more advanced than dd. But it has its uses and is great in a pinch.

Anyway I'm not completely sure about your question. Here's my understanding: dd doesn't care if the OS marks a block as bad. The block shouldn't be bad on the destination disk, so you let the OS do a disk check after the restore. It will mark the block as good and you will regain its use.

If the block is so bad that the read fails, dd does what you tell it to do. I think the default is to fail. But with "conv=noerror,sync" set, dd will keep going and pad the rest of that block with zeroes. This is actually desirable...if it's gone, it's gone, but usually you can at least get some of it. For a failing disk or scratched CD, etc, copying at the file level may not get you anywhere.

Finally, there are a class of errors for which the drive transparently replaces a known bad block in an unadvertised extra part of the disk. In this case any software asking for that block, including dd, will get the replacement block. Only using the manufacturer's low-level format tool will get that block back.

The main disadvantage of dd over something like Ghost is that it copies everything you tell it to, even empty space. So an image of an 80 GB disk will literally be 80 GB. However you can do things like send the output to gzip to shrink it. The advantage is that it's free and it's standard. I don't know how any of this compares to Acronis. I brought up dd as a solution to the problem of preserving the Dell bootloader, but it looks like Acronis can do that anyway.

edit: some extra info...the MBR & partition table are in the first 512 bytes of the drive. dd will happily copy the whole thing, when you restore to a disk of a different size, it doesn't know that, it just copies those 512 bytes to the new disk. You fix the partition table after the transfer. For those who like gory details:
http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/mbr/STDMBR.htm

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

John, Dell does supply a set of discs with new PC's, along with the restore partition. Obviously, if the hard drive failed the discs would be needed to reinstall on a new hard drive. Dell even has an on-line form and will supply one free replacement set of discs for those that get sloppy and lose theirs. Actually only the OS disc is needed as all the device drivers can be downloaded from their download site.

John Cipriano · From: San Francisco

Yeah, all of the OptiPlexes we've gotten have come with both XP and Vista media. But I definitely remember a time when XP discs weren't standard on the home models. In a way this was kind of an improvement because the extra software (DVD player and whatnot) is built into the restore image rather than having to be reinstalled.

I think the silliest OEM restore I've seen was on a newish Toshiba laptop I tried out...the restore image was split across 3 CDs, except it wasn't a finished image, it was a copy of XP with a big startup script that installs the drivers and various OEM software, and then runs Sysprep. And it didn't work right.

The end-user shouldn't have to see Sysprep, and if something goes wrong they could end up with a copy of XP that works but doesn't pass WGA.

But my favorite was the HP towers where the restore discs sat in a spindle that was molded into the top of the case...I doubt it won any design awards.

Earl Foote · From: Houston, Tx, USA

Well it worked. I'm getting an error on boot up though. The system can't find a file named dsvsvc.exe that has something to do with Creative software. Seems the workaround is to uninstall all your Creative software and reinstall and the problem goes away. But evidently this file is needed for the uninstall because I get an error during the uninstall.

Wiz Feinberg · From: Mid-Michigan, USA

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