Swapping Out HDD in my inspiron 1520

[1520hdd]

I'm swapping the 120GB WD1200 drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136072) in my inspiron 1520 for a 640GB WD6400 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136568).

I want to use the acronis software by western digital (http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119) to make an image of my current HDD. I want to keep my programs and everything, so my plan is to put the image on an external drive, then swap out the hard drives in my laptop, and somehow put the image onto the new one.

I have a couple of questions:
1) What should I do once I've swapped the drives in my laptop? ie. How will I get the image from the external drive onto the new internal drive?

2) My current 120GB drive is partitioned into a C:\99GB and D:\9GB partition. Will this cause problems when on the new drive? (will the amount of space in each partition stay the same? if so where would all the new space go?)

3) The new drive (WD6400BPVT) uses 4k sectors while I'm pretty sure my old drive uses 512 bit sectors. Will this cause a problem when installing the image?

Thanks very much!

 

[WyomingKnott]

1) If you have a CD burner, Acronis will let you make a bootable CD. If not, I'm going to guess that you have an external drive (where this image is), and you could make that bootable.

2) It should not cause a problem. I haven't done this with Acronis, only Ghost 2003. Ghost gives me the option of leaving the sizes alone with unallocated space at the end of the drive or expanding them to fill the drive. Let us know what happens with Acronis.

3) Here I'm not sure. If I had to bet, I'd bet on it working fine. What OS are you running? I may be wrong, but I think that XP doesn't play too nicely with these drives, even on an HDD. Check and see if WD provides a workaround.

Good luck

 

[1520hdd]

thank you ! I'm running vista so it should handle the 4k sectors fine, I was just wondering if there could be a possibility that all the data written in 512 format would somehow mess up in 4k sectors. But I think it should go fine as well.

I'll check through acronis' menus to see what I can find. I have no idea how to make an external drive bootable (I won't be able to fit my data image onto a CD or DVD) but I'm sure i'll find the answer quickly on google