PC-PRO March 2008 CD/DVD Freebie "Acronis True Image 8.0 Personal Edition"

Hi,

I've just an interesting time replacing an 80GB drive on my WinXP Pro Dell Dimension 3100, with a replacement 500GB drive (both SATA, Samsung SpinPoints).

The full product software (requires an email address) on the PC Pro disc is a few versions behind the current V.11, but thought I'd have a go anyway reading some of the recent comments here.

The inital plan was to use the software to make an image of the 80GB original drive and store the created file on another 120GB drive already in the machine. Then swap the original drive and build the 500GB from the file on the 120GB using the Acronis Boot 'live' CD.

I went onwards and imaged the 80GB drive in 20 minutes (fast!), swapped drives and booted the live CD...

Gotcha #1

My Dell system is USB keyboard/mose only, and the live boot CD does not find the keyboard or mouse once the GUI is up. That's strange 'cuz when the CD is booting you can type rubbish from the keyboard, but when the look-alike windows environment is loaded - no key response, nada, nothing...

Well, BartPE & Acronis came to the rescue here!

<http://eu.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/bartpe/>

Acronis have on their website instructions how to load a special cut of their version 8.0 product as a plugin for BartPE. BartPE when built (using an XP installation CD) came up OK, and keyboard/mouse control was regained.... until...

Gotcha #2

The 120GB drive partition containing the image was nowhere to be found. The partition was dynamic (LVM) and as such is not supported by Acronis when running under BartPE.

OK, I decided it was time for some straight disk to disk copying instead of staging via the 120GB disk. With the BartPE live book disk, copying (and resizing) the partitions from the 80GB original drive to the 500GB replacement was painless - should have done just that in the first place!

This software (and BartPE) is damm useful & recommended - but if ye are installing it, make sure to grab the BartPE plugin from the website (before it gets dropped) and create a BartPE CD - ye might come across other machines that won't play their boot CD!

Any comments on backup speed using USB hard drives and Acronis?

--
Adrian 'Way Too much Diet Coke Today' C
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