I have a larger hard drive that I would like to place in an IBM R51e laptop. The current HDD is XP Pro, 40GB and almost all of that is used up. I'm using Acronis v11 to clone or pull down the image I backed up to a USB drive. It's only placing the same partitions on the new 160GB HDD? I can't seem to extend the partitions. The primary OS is on 33GB then there is the IBM preload on the remaining 7GB. When it clones the HDD or pulls down the Acronis image it's leaving one large section of unallocated space on the new HDD. Does anyone have some simple steps I can follow to try and use the new HDD with only one large partition and then keep the smaller IBM preload on the smaller 7GB area?
Thank you.
You will need 1 writable CD or DVD.
Once you've copied the 7GB IBM Restore partition and 33GB XP partition over,
download GParted.
Once GParted is on your desktop, you'll need to download
ISO Recorder, making sure to download the version appropriate for the operating system you're going to install ISO Recorder on.
Once ISO Recorder is installed, right click on the GParted file you downloaded earlier -> Burn Image -> Put the writable CD or DVD in your optical drive -> Burn the image to disc.
Once the image is burned to the disc, put the disc in the PC with the fresh hard drive installed, boot up and find your way to the boot menu (usually F11 or F12, google your PC's model number to find out) -> Boot from CD/DVD -> Follow the onscreen guide.
Once you're in GParted, you'll see your partitions. Here, you can extend your 33GB partition to fill the remainder of your hard drive.
You could also take this time to make a whole new partition, rather than extending your 33GB partition. This will allow you to store personal files (pictures, music, etc) on a partition separate from the operating system. Should something happen to the 33GB XP partition, your files shouldn't be effected by this (e.g: XP crashes and needs to be re-installed. If you had your personal data on another partition, it wouldn't be lost when you re-installed XP on the 33GB partition).
It's your choice, and your data.. the latter is what I usually recommend, and it's what I do on all of my PC's.
-Michael
