Upgrading a Laptop Hard Disk - Page 6

With the new disk now plugged into the laptop, it's time to begin the cloning process.

1. Open Acronis True Image, then go to Disk Utilities and click the 'Clone Disk' option.



2. The Disk Clone Wizard will now open, click 'Next',


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3. You should now see the 'Clone Mode' screen. Choose 'Manual' to allow full control over the process, then click next,


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4. You will now be asked to select the 'source' disk (the one currently in the laptop that you want to copy). Click the appropriate disk, and click next,


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5. Next you'll be asked to select the destination disk (where you want to copy the source disk to). Simply click the appropriate disk, and click next,


Tip: the new disk should be empty. If this is the case, then the graphical representation of the disk at the bottom should have a large green bar.

6. When asked what you want to do with your old disk after the cloning process *always* choose 'Keep Data' as a precaution. Afterall, there's always a chance that your new disk could become faulty after the cloning process, and you'd kick yourself if you wiped the old one in haste. Now click next,


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7. If your hard disk only has one partition, or you want the existing partitions to be transferred and resized proportionally (e.g. If you currently have two partitions; one 10GB and the other 30GB on a 40GB disk, and when upgrading to a 80Gb disk want the 10GB disk to become 20GB, and the 30GB partition to become 60GB ), then choose the 'Proportional' option, click next and skip to step 18. If on the other hand you want full control over the partition sizes on the new disk, as I do here, choose 'Manual' then click next.


The 'As is' option is only recommended if you want to preserve the existing partition sizes when moving to the new disk, allowing you to do other things with the free space - such as the creation of additional partition(s).

8. Next up is the part where you get to decide how big you want your new partitions. Initially it'll show you what it would look like if it was resized proportionally, but naturally that's far too easy for people like us! Besides, in this configuration, it's given far too much space to some partitions, and not enough to others. Tick the 'Proceed Relayout' option, and click next,


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9. The next screen you'll see allows you to choose the destination partitions that you want to reconfigure from the default sizes.


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A quick bit of background first though; this laptop I'm upgrading originally came with a manufacturer created restore partition of around 4 and a half Gigabytes. Now since this is only a small blip on the radar of a 250GB disk, I see no reason to remove it. Afterall, for whatever reason there may come a day when the laptop needs to be restored back the way it was when it was first purchased.

However, proportionally it would be resized to over 10GB by Acronis during the cloning process - this seems a little pointless if there's only ever going to be just over 4GB of data on there! Therefore, this is going to be the first partition we want to reconfigure.

To do this, we first select the 'PQSERVICE' backup partition, and click next,

10. On the next screen we see a graphical representation of the new PQSERVICE partition. Now this is the best bit; using the mouse cursor all we have to do is simply click and drag on the right-hand side of the bar at the top, 'pulling' the right-hand edge of the partition to the left, making it smaller. You don't even have to use the numbers underneath, it can all be done with the mouse cursor!


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In this example, the cursor stops at around 50% of the way there, signifying that I've reached the previous size of the partition. All I do is let go of the mouse button, and I'm ready to move onto the next partition by clicking next,


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Article Navigation:

• Introduction
• Preparation
• Getting The Right Disk For The Job
• Shopping!
• Clone Wars
• A Disky Exchange
• Activation
• Waste Not, Want Not
• Until Next Time