Knowledge Base

The new disk, to which you clone your older one, should be inside the laptop during the operation

This article applies to:

• Acronis True Image Home 2012
• Acronis True Image Home 2011
• Acronis True Image Home 2010
• Acronis True Image Home 2009

Introduction

If you have decided to replace the hard disk of your laptop with a new one, you can use Acronis backup software to do the cloning.

(!) The important point to remember is that you need to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Only after this you may do the cloning. Otherwise you will not be able to boot from the new cloned drive. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

(!) The cloning should be done from Acronis Bootable Media (created on CD/DVD or Flash). When cloning from Acronis Bootable Media, you do not need to have an operating system or an Acronis product installed on the new drive. You do not even need to have the new drive formatted to do the cloning. For information on Acronis Bootable Media see Standalone Version of Acronis Software.

Solution

Assuming that you have your new drive installed in the laptop, and the old one connected via USB, here is a sample cloning scenario with Acronis True Image Home 2010 or Acronis True Image Home 2011:

• Run Acronis True Image Home and select Tools & Utilities -> Clone Disk:

  

• Select the Automatic mode to have your old disk's partitions automatically and proportionally resized to fit the new disk:

  

• Select your old hard disk, which is connected via USB, as the source disk:

  

• Select the new hard disk, which is installed in the laptop, as the destination disk:

  

• Click OK to allow the product to erase all data from the destination disk (required to do the cloning):

  

• Review the operation on the Summary window, and click Proceed to start the cloning:

  

The product will then clone the disk.

More information

Cloning of both desktop and laptop hard disks is supported.

See also:

• Transferring a System from IDE to SATA Hard Disk and Vice Versa
• Resizing Partitions during Disk Cloning