Bootable Hard drive cloning

[F3Ature1]

Hi guys, I need help desperately to create a bootable HD to upgrade from 120GB to 250GB in my Acer Aspire laptop.
I tried using Acronis and it didn't boot, I tried with xxclone and I got messages 1.NTLDR file not found in the source volume. 2.NTDetect.com file not found in the source volume.
How do I create a bootable drive and any help and suggestions are most welcome. Thanks and Happy New Year to everyone.

 

[F3Ature1]

Success!!!
I have used Acronis and cloned my new drive,replaced the old with the new in my laptop and it didn't boot. I tried the Repair with my Vista disc and everything is fine afterwards. I hope this help someone in the future. Thanks for reading my post.

 

[elmo2006]

How are you cloning said drive? What steps and with what version?

I've cloned drives and performed images to new drives without a hitch using Acronis TIH.

Thanks

 

[F3Ature1]

How are you cloning said drive? What steps and with what version?

I've cloned drives and performed images to new drives without a hitch using Acronis TIH.

Thanks

I was using Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 and I made sure no USB peripherals attached and disconnected my Internet, when I added the new drive I made it bootable as well. When the cloning process started I received the error message" ERROR: Unable to write disk1 sector 18994323(Retry,Ignore,Ignore All). I pressed I in the key pad and the process continued. When it said the cloning was successful I replaced the old drive with the new(cloned) drive.
When I tried to boot it failed and I thought Acronis didn't clone properly, so I have tried other programs as I have posted in my first post but they didn't help either.
After reading many posts on other forums I came across this solution about Repair using Vista disc,now I am relieved to have sorted out my problem and very pleased with the performance of my new hard drive.
I am not an expert to pin point why this happened but I assume this is something to do with Vista as all cloning programs I tried produced the same effect.

 

[leon2006]

Acronis can clone your drive through creation of image file or clone a disk option on its utilities-option.

When generating image file there are times that you have to check the copy sector by sector for Acronis to generate an image file.

 

[JonathanDeane]

Had I seen this sooner I would have posted this

http://clonezilla.org/

Its free and works pretty well for the once in a blue moon disk dupe

 

[F3Ature1]

I wanted to keep the hidden factory image from the old hard drive, only Acronis Migrate Easy mentioned "as is" option when cloning, I didn't know or I must have missed the particular info from other cloning programs.

 

[elmo2006]

Good news then and kudos to you solving the problem

 

[Doc Blase]

I just went through this in order to create an exact Acer System copy for the day the original drive fails or some malware wrecks the original MBR and corrupts OS (as it did last week and cost me 14 hours of grief.)

I used a WD drive of the same size as my Veriton Seagate (320 Gigs) and did an Acronis Clone procedure "As-Is". Per Acronis' instructions I placed the new receiving drive in the Drive 1 spot with same connections.

The scary part was when I removed the original system drive and rebooted- after the "Loading Windows" message, the Acer Bios went to a blinking DOS-like cursor and just sat there.

Going into the F-12 BIOS Advanced Settings there was another surprise, the WD 320 was not listed as a bootable choice. Optical Drive and my 1.5 TB data drive were the only choices.

The fix was to F-9 (reset ) the Acer BIOS, that immediately brought up the WD 320, selected it as 1st Boot Device, F-10 to save and exit, and we were golden.

When the machine would not initially boot to the WD clone, I thought there is some proprietary BIOS setting it had been keyed to in the original system disk so it HAD to be that serial number Seagate OR that Acronis had somehow failed in it's exact cloning.

I am typing this on the WD cloned drive, so I just wanted to post that there is hope that you can do this on an Acer and it can work. The hidden rescue partition is even there just like on the original.

The Acronis I used comes free with WD drives, I don't know if that means you can use it only on a WD drive or if having one in your system is sufficient, because I am leaving well enough alone.