Acronis

[beavereater]

I have Acronis ver. 9. I am left in the dark without a PC guru to help me in Japan. I need your help.

My situation:
2 years ago I bought a new motherboard and SATA drive. Unfortunately, the motherboard would not pick up the SATA drive properly, I would get half-way through the install and it would freeze. I essentially put my old 30GB IED HD back in for the OS and used the SATA for my stuff. The 30GB is old!! Maxtor (The SATA drive) hasn't responded to giving me firmware update like the GIGABYTE site FAQ says I should to get it working.

I want to use Acronis to create an image of my 30GB drive and put it on my SATA drive OR external HD. I want to take out the old IED and put in the new one I bought today. I would like to then install windows and put the image from the SATA drive onto the IDE drive. Can this be done? Or am I missing a step?

Knowing that I can't really rely on my SATA for the install...what's the safest way of doing things?

[guns1inger]

Your Acronis disc should be bootable. Boot from it, with your USB HDD plugged in. Create a image (.tib file) of your current boot drive (30GB drive) to your USB HDD. Depending on how full the source drive is, you may need 20+ GB free space and it could take an hour or so to complete. Once it is done, shut down your PC, swap out the 30GB drive and put the new drive in. Boot from the Acronis disc again, and this time restore from the image (.tib file) on the USB HDD to your new HDD. Once this completes, remove the Acronis disc and restart your PC. If you have do this all correctly, you should boot into windows as it was on your old drive.