[TriLUG] Fwd: image of hard drive question

David Burton ncdave4life at gmail.com
Fri Dec 21 13:56:40 EST 2012


trilug-owner at trilug.org wrote:

> "Your message was too big; please trim it to less than 9 KB in size."



Resending (truncated)... * (Can someone please increase
the ridiculously tiny message size limit for this list?)*


Joe,

I've replaced many hard disk drives in Windows machines, and never
encountered software which failed to run afterward, because of the new
drive. Windows, itself, may say that's installing new drivers the first
time it boots on the new drive, but that never seems to cause a problem.

Microsoft Windows checks many parts in the computer to validate that you're
not using one copy of Windows on 2 or more computers, but it tolerates
replacement of any one or two parts. So if you just replace the hard disk
drive, there shouldn't be a Windows license problem. If you replace many
parts in the computer, you might have to have a voice conversation with
Microsoft (which involves reading and typing some very long numbers over
the phone). You'll need to explain that you've repaired the computer and
replaced parts. Be sure that your repaired computer contains at least one
part from your old computer (maybe just a DVD drive), and tell them that,
and they should let you validate the license on the repaired machine.

If the old drive is healthy, then Acronis True Image is the easiest way to
image it. Acronis can make a bootable CD, so that it's easy to restore the
image onto a fresh, empty drive. Acronis understands NTFS, and can resize
your partitions as needed, in case the new drive is a different size. It
skips the free-space, so there's no need to zero the free-space before you
make the backup. It does a reasonable job of compressing the resulting
image, and it can break the image file into pieces, for storage on DVDs or
M-Discs.

When imaging a drive with Acronis True Image, I like to use an image file
size of "1492MB" (remember
Columbus<http://www.google.com/search?q=columbus+1492>!)
and maximum compression. 1492MB is a hair smaller than 1/3 of a 4.7 GB DVD,
so three of the files fit nicely on a DVD or
M-Disc<http://www.google.com/search?q=%22M-Disc%22>,
and it's smaller than the 2GB file size limit for FAT32 file systems (so
you can copy the files onto thumbdrives).

Recent versions of Acronis True Image allow you to create the image files
on the same hard disk drive partition(s) that are being imaged. That's
handy if your next step will be to burn them to DVDs or M-Discs.

(*Note:* If the old drive is failing, then Acronis is *not* your friend.
They might have improved it by now, but a few years ago I tried to use it
to back up a friend's drive that I didn't know was failing. Acronis got
about halfway done, hit a read error, and aborted - after *deleting* all
its already-created image files! Arrrrrgh! The drive had failed completely,
and all my friend's data was gone forever - an ironic result from a backup
operation which had the purpose of preserving his data. So if the drive is
ill, you'll need to attempt recovery some other way. IMO, the best approach
is to use Linux (perhaps a bootable Parted Magic CD or thumbdrive), to copy
the key documents off the ill drive, and then use ddrescue to try to image
the whole thing to another drive, or to an image file on another drive.)

If any drive in the machine is by Western Digital, Seagate, or Maxtor, you
can download & use a free version of Acronis TrueImage. The free versions
won't do "incremental" backups, but they are fine for this imaging chore:
http://www.google.com/search?q=free+acronis+"true+image"+("western+digital"+OR+seagate+OR+maxtor)&oq=free+acronis+"true+image"+("western+digital"+OR+seagate+OR+maxtor)<http://www.google.com/search?q=free+acronis+%22true+image%22+(%22western+digital%22+OR+seagate+OR+maxtor)&oq=free+acronis+%22true+image%22+(%22western+digital%22+OR+seagate+OR+maxtor)>

*...[snip]...*



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