Help: Western Digital Advanced Format for "Green Drive"

[Totempole]

Ok, so I'm building a new CoreI3 for someone who needs a new Office PC.
My critical mistake was to buy a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive to
save some money with the current hard drive shortages.

The 1TB Green was even cheaper than the 500GB Blue. In hindsight I should
have bought the blue.

Anyway, I did some research and discovered that I could enhance the
performance by using their Advanced Format Utility and WD Align Tool.

Now it get's confusing, I need to clone the old machine's XP Installation
to the new 1TB drive.

The old machine has 2x 80GB IDE Hard Drives which must be cloned to the
1TB on Separate partitions (I was thinking over 2x ~500GB partitions)

Usually this is a simple task using Norton Ghost, but it appears, since I
need to have XP and 2 partitions on the 1TB, it's not so simple.

Could someone please give me a step-by-step on how to go about this
and where to start?

This is what I've downloaded so far:
Acronis WD Align
Acronis True Image WD Edition

 

[Hawkeye22]

I don't think you will be able to clone at all as it will overwrite the advanced format. From what I understand, you can use a standard format on that drive, but it will hinder performance greatly.

 

[Totempole]

According to Western Digital you can, but you have to use Acronis True Image Western Digital Edition (Provided as a Download after product registration.)

My confusion lies with the 2 Partitions that I require the drive to have, and which application to use first.

When I go to this link and answer the questionaire on the right:
http://www.wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7&language=1

I give these answers:
OS: Windows XP
Cloning Utility: Yes
Primary or Secondary Drive: Primary
Number of Partitions: 2

It then takes me to this page:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=805&lang=en

Which offers
Acronis WD Align and Acronis True Image WD Edition

So here's what I think needs to happen:

I create a WD Align Bootable CD, and "Advanced Format The Drive.

My next step since the Old PC has 2x IDE Hard Drives and the New PC
doesn't support IDE is to insert the Old Drives into external enclosures
and connect them by USB.

Now since Acronis True Image "Runs in Windows", that's where the dead
end begins, since the new CoreI3 doesn't have an OS loaded.

Any Suggestions guys? No one else has been in this position?

 

[Hawkeye22]

I have acronis truimage 2009 at home. you can create a bootable rescue disk which contains all you need to copy/restore without an OS in place. I'm not sure if the WD edition has the same option. If it does, you can use another computer to create the bootable dvd.

 

[Totempole]

It seems like it does (from the screenshots on the WD website), but I can't install the App to my PC, since it says it requires a WD hard drive, and I only have Seagates in my machine, so I'll have to wait and see what happens when I get the machine that needs to be cloned.

Here's what I think I'm going to try first.
1. I have HD Clone 2010, so I'm going to clone the drives using that.
2. If all goes well, I will probably have to repair the XP Installation.
3. Once I've completed the XP Clone, I'm going to run the Acronis WD Align tool.

Hopefully that should work out, If not I'm back at square 1.

Will keep you posted.

 

[Totempole]

UPDATE: I was able to clone the drive pretty easily with HDClone 2010, and the program allowed for 4K alignment at the same time, so it was pretty quick and painless.

Anyways, it's all sorted now.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Awesome! Thanks for the update.