Upgrading a Laptop Hard Disk - Page 7

11. After resizing that partition, I'm returned to the screen from step 8, only now the PQSERVICE partition is smaller, and there's a little free space to its right-hand side:


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With 'Proceed Relayout' still ticked, it's time to click Next again. For simplicity, I'm resizing partitions from the 'left' of the disk, to the 'right' - this helps when tidying up free space reclaimed from the previous partition, as you'll see in a second.

12. The 'next disk along' is drive C, the system partition with Windows installed, so we'll highlight that one and click next,


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13. Now, while Vista does use rather a lot of space, this laptop stores all of its documents on drive D:, so I don't think there's really any reason to have nearly 75GB just for Windows and programs to use - the space can be better used for the data partition, so we'll make it a little smaller.


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I'm going to use the mouse to resize the partition like before, but this time I'm going to start by dragging the left-hand side all the way to the left - this removes the block of free space left by shrinking the PQSERVICE partition earlier, and leaves things a little neater. Once that's done, I'm going to drag the right-hand side of the partition over until the partition size gets to around 45GB. This should still leave around 20GB of free space on this partition, ready for any new software that might get installed.


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Once this is done, we can click next,

14. One more partition to resize now, the data partition. With 'Proceed Relayout' still ticked, click next.


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15. Highlight the final partition (Data), and click next,


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16. As before, we'll get rid of the free space in front of the partition by dragging the left-hand side of the disk to the left:


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Since there's no unallocated space after this partition, and we want it as big as possible, we're done here. Click next,


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17. Double check the overview of the new partition layout. Once we're sure it's what we want, untick 'Proceed Relayout' and click next,


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18. Acronis will now show you a breakdown of what it's about to do. Check it through, and when you're ready, click 'Proceed'.


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You will now be prompted to restart your machine. Ensure the AC adapter is plugged in and switched on at the wall, then click 'Reboot'.



19. When the machine now starts up, we see Acronis doing its work:



Depending on the size of your own disks, the cloning process might take a little while. On this machine it took around half an hour. Once completed, you'll get the following confirmation message:

It's now time to swap the hard disks around.

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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