I have a new WD3200BEKT to upgrade the 80G drive on my Windows XP laptop and downloaded Acronis True Image WD Edition to prepare the drive via a USB caddy. I installed Acronis OK (which recognised the WD drive) and cloned the on-board disk onto it. I then used Ubuntu (booted from CD) to prepare a partition in the remaining space for a Ubuntu dual boot install. Ubuntu clobbered the Windows boot (changed primary partition?), but more worrying is that I cannot now run Acronis because it claims that there is no WD disk on my system (it is in fact connected via a USB adapter). How can I get the disk back to it’s original state to run the Acronic clone again?
Not to sure of this but when you load Vista and Windows 7 to a single partition it makes a 200mb partition with the boot loader. A lot of people dual booting use things like the grub loader. Take a look on the Acronis forum you’ll probably find more info there.
Joe
I have now managed to get Acronis to recognise the drive by deleting the Windows partition. I know that in my case (OEM XP) there is a boot partition, Windows partition and a Dell restore partition. Grub is not the issue since I have not installed Linux on the disk yet. It seems I have fallen into the same trap as others (as I have read), that have resized the disk by cloning a smaller disk using the Acronis tool. This apparently gets recorded in the disk firmware and can only be restored using tools like HDD Capacity Restore - but that requires the disk to be mounted directly via SATA, not through a USB adapter. To complicate the issue, a laptop such as mine can only support a single drive which hosts the OS (Windows) and HDD Capacity Restore cannot dismount the drive to access the firmware. I have found a DOS utility called HDAT2 which can be run from a DOS boot CD against the drive installed in the HDD bay. This is driving me crazy. Does anyone know of a simpler solution to restore the drive to factory settings?
Go to the Acronis forum and look through the tutorials by Grover. There is also controversy over which is better cloning and imaging http://forum.acronis.com/forum/3355 see post 11 by Grover. When I make an image I do it from the rescue CD. I’ve never got into cloning a drive.
Joe
Joe, thanks for your help. I have removed the HPA from my drive using the tools at http://www.hdat2.com/. There is also a lot of useful information at http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm and http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm. My laptop has a feature called MediaDirect that automatically expands a tiny HPA partition to fill the remainder of the disk. My drive now reports 320GB (well 298 GB actually according to Windows) in the XP Disk Management tool. I now need to figure out the best way to clone my original disk without the same problem. Fornunately Dan Goodell has documented some ways around the problem.
Thantk for the reply it’s pretty complex software and not as simple to do as it sounds.
Joe
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