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[tafkajp]

okay I have been trying to read the instructions for the last half an hour, so I thought I would just ask.  Can I clone a hard drive to an external HD, replace the existing HD with a new one and put the image back on the new HD if the usb external HD is not supported in bios to be booted from?  Or do I need to install the new HD as a secondary then clone, then replace primary HD with secondary HD.  My other half is trying to keep the same puter until after Vista, its ancient and the 20 GB hard drive is full.  Thanks for any help, back to the manual.

taf

[Ryan Wagner]

Judging by the title of your post you're using Acronis True Image? If that's the case you shouldn't have any troubles when it's set as an external drive. This is a pretty good tutorial on moving a Windows installation from one drive to another without Acronis though:

http://winhlp.com/node/66

It also has some troubleshooting info in case something goes wrong.

[tafkajp]

Thanks Ryan,

I have read quite a few tutorials using ghost and assume the process will be similar with acronis, I am reformatting an external hard drive right now and will put a couple of partitions on it to make disk images of the computers in the house, just in case.  I had been using cobian to backup my computer weekly but had it set up wrong and had 4 copies of my own computer on it, don't need that much over kill, I have another external that just has backup of files. 

The link you sent looks like it covers many problems I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere yet.  I am crossing my fingers that I don't need it.

Thanks again,

taf

[Ryan Wagner]

No problem... make sure you let us know how it goes.

[tafkajp]

okay, it appears the clone to external drive went okay.  But when it was done I noticed that the copy was fat32, not ntfs.  Do I need to convert to ntfs if I am going to a 160 GB HD or will fat32 be okay?  From what I read, fat32 limits file size to 4GB which should be plenty for the other half, but I think I also read, but can't find again so might not be true, that disk size was also limited to 32GB?

Do I need to convert fat32 to ntfs for a 160GB, and should I do so before moving to the new hard drive or after.

taf

[Ryan Wagner]

That 4GB limitation I'm pretty sure is true with FAT32, but I think the disk size limitation is over 100GB (but less than 160GB). I think you should go with NTFS though because it's normally considered to be more stable, and you should probably do so before moving the new hard drive over.

I assume that your original installation that you copied is NTFS?

[tafkajp]

No, original installation is FAT32.  My plan is to copy it to the new hard drive and then convert, if I had been paying attention I would have converted before the copy was made.  Oh well, live and learn.

[tafkajp]

Successful installation and copy to the new hard drive.  I did not change from FAT32 to NTFS yet though, I need to read more about it.

taf

[Richard]

good to hear it when so well

[Ryan Wagner]

Glad it worked out for you. If your original installation is FAT32 I'm not sure if converting is a good idea. It could mess things up in the end.

[tafkajp]

Since everything seems to be working, I decided to leave it as FAT32.  Easy decision to make especially since it isn't my computer. 

taf