Laptop drive migration - Acronis?

cavemanoc

cavemanoc

cavemanoc

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23 Mar 2005
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It's here at last - my shiny new 160gb 7200.2 Momentus is in my grubby mits!!! (Thank you OcUK - all is forgiven - your customer support was excellent as always :) )

Right - I'm trying to migrate my old 5400rpm samsung drive onto the momentus 7200PRM replacing it on my Dell m1710. I thought it would be a simple matter of cloning the drive in Acronis, ejecting the old one and plugging in the new one - job's a good'un.....

Right....

I won't go into the pain and suffering I went through to clone the samsung (nothing to do with Acronis which really is the simplest and friendliest piece of software I've ever used!) but suffice to say I did it - plugged in the new HDD and the machine goes through a constant boot loop - bios boot screen - blank screen - bios boot screen etc...

I can enter the Dell Boot menus (Hdd/Cd/NIC etc...) and the Bios. I can access the rather splendid Dell Diagnostic utilities (Someone needs to produce some of these for us overclockers - they are awesome :eek: ) - and nothing is wrong - sees the new drive, says it's fine.

I can't f8 into Vista Safeboot so I'm guessing it's not even satrting to load the Kernel.

Any ideas please?!?

The only thing I'll add is that when I cloned the drive I let it autoset the partition sizes (120gb->160Gb) - so all 4 of the Dell partitions grewproportionally (Main partition, recovery partition, +2 other odd partitions I assume are part of the system.)

I'm busy trying to re-clone it with the partitions remaining the same to see if that's what causing problems and then I'll 'simply' expand the main partition into the spare 30Gb once/if it works.

Anyone else tried this before?
 
Well - I gave up in the end and re-installed via xp then Vista. A long painful process, but at least it works now! New drive is nice and nippy - never put a smile on my face coming from a 4 way scsi array on the desktop, but at least it's a lot quicker than the old Samsung.

I'd love to find out why this didn't work - it's exactly what Acronis was designed for, and the cloning worked flawlessly - must be something to do with the setup on the laptop - not aware of any driver issues on the Hdd's that could have caused this problem - has anyone else tried this on any other laptops?
 
Slackworth said:
Did you try running the Vista CD from boot up as it has a boot fix utillity?
Click to expand...

Yep - didn't even give the CD a chance to run, just went through the boot - reboot routine - something in the dell partition (one of the 4 anyway) seemed to be interfering with the boot process for some reason and not letting me get to the windows boot menu or the CD boot option. Very strange.

That said - I'm actually quite happy now as it came with a whole world of carp on it that is now gone, an I get to choose the setup to suit rather than having to strip away the layers of rubbish it came pre-installed with. (Especially the stuff that didn't work :mad: that really wound me up - had to patch it out of the tin as the rubbish authoring software was incompatible with Vista - nice one Dell :rolleyes: )

In hindsight, I think I should have tried just cloning the actual Vista partition, and now the others, and that probably would have solved the problem, or for the fresh install, I should have just formatted the drive and I'm pretty sure I'd have been able to install Vista without going through XP, but hey - I know for next time!

I'll be intrigued to see if anyone else that comes across this manages a better solution - otherwise I'll just have to put it down to yet another Dell-ism :p
 
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