Moving whole system to a bigger drive

[Elmo Putney]

Santa left a 1TB drive under the tree for me this year, and I've just got round to trying to migrate to it. I really don't want to do a ground up re-build so I've been trying to image the old drive onto the new.

specs first:

Old drive: 300GB: 20 GB System/boot/windows partion, 260 GB recordings partion, 20 GB Gigabyte xpress recovery ext2 partition.

I am essentially trying to replicate the above but with a bigger recordings partition, it doesnt matter if the xpress recovery partion is lost in the transfer as that can be re-created once up and running.

So I've been using paragon hard disk manager on my work computer to try and copy the image across, and once copied I can see all the files on the new drive but when I chuck it back in my HTPC I get a disk read error when it tries to boot. Its obviosly missing some critical boot/MBR etc.. files.

How have other people achived this, what software? Norton Ghost?

[whurlston]

Acronis True Image Home 2009.

Just clone the disk. It will auto expand the last partition on the drive.

[martint123]

Acronis has worked for me every time. Either clone or do an image backup and restore to the new drive.

Hint:. Stop the gbpvr recording service with services.msc while switching things around to prevent the recording service from purging the database with recordings it can't find (as when moving them).

[Elmo Putney]

Hint:. Stop the gbpvr recording service with services.msc while switching things around to prevent the recording service from purging the database with recordings it can't find (as when moving them).

Yep I already thought of that!

I think I have found the issue, the xpress recovery partition has to be at a certain place on the drive, and it would appear that the non-stadard bootsector that xpress recovery uses doesn't like it when it moves. The fix will involve removing the mbr and the ext2 partition and creating a standard boot config.....well we'll see if that works tommorrow....

[stustunz]

why do you want to move the operating system to the same drive as you are recording on ?
why not just move your movies to a new folder on the 1tb drive then use vidimport and drag and drop that folder onto the vidimport exe file, job done
you can even add new movies that have never been in the data base
just make sure you have .net3.5 installed (.net 3.0 wont do)

[Elmo Putney]

why do you want to move the operating system to the same drive as you are recording on ?

Heat, noise, space and power mainly

[gEd]

Heat, noise, space and power mainly

precisely why I upgraded to 1TB + 450GB and now have 160GB and a 250GB sitting idle (oh and 2 x 120GB from another system..)

I didn;t bother with the xpress recovery partition on my systems. I just use Acronis TI 2008 to backup to an external drive. Best £25 I ever spent.

[Pob]

Call me old-school, but I have always used the 600kb Norton Ghost DOS 2003 executable to clone drives, and it has never let me down. You need to boot the PC with any boot disk with DOS to use it - I use an old Win98SE CD.
The only other consideration is that, if you have only NTFS drives, then you need the ghost executable on a floppy or FAT32 USB stick, or included on the boot disk, because DOS cannot 'see' NTFS drives.
Backup software running in Windows seems rather bloated in comparison!
When you clone a drive, than all the partitions are 'scaled up' automatically - for example a 10gb partition on a 100gb drive becomes a 100gb partition on a terrabyte drive. Or you can partition the drive first and then clone individual partitions over.
Ghost clones are forensic copies - in fact you get an option to 'tag' the drive as a clone backup, but only if you want to. When you have loads of applications and games, cloning is the only way to go!
You should check out your hard drive manufacturers website as most provide similar tools for free; http://www.pctechbytes.com/harddrive.htm

[Elmo Putney]

All sorted now, I re-ran the cloning and all was well. Don't know why it didn't work first time around.

I do like the Xpress recovery, it obviously doesn't protect you from a drive failure, but it is a very convenient way of undoing any "improvements" that might not have gone according to plan. I will get myself something to backup to externally sometime soon.