A
Anna
MrMachine said:
LeRoy:
Yes, you could remove the HDD from its USB external enclosure and install it
as an internal HDD in your PC replacing the current internal HDD. As such it
will be bootable and completely functional. We do this all the time either
to replace a defective internal HDD or to replace it with a larger HDD as I
take it is your objective.
If the latter was your objective another way of accomplishing this (prior to
installing the HDD in its external enclosure) would have been to simply
install that HDD as a secondary internal HDD in your system and simply clone
the contents of your primary HDD to the secondary one and then connect (and
possibly jumper) the new HDD to serve as your primary HDD. Either way is
fine.
Since you already have the Acronis True Image v 10 program I really see no
reason to change assuming you're satisfied with that program. It should do
the job you want without any problem (except under the circumstances I've
detailed below). As you know we greatly prefer the Casper 4 program for
day-in day-out disk-to-disk cloning operations in order to maintain
comprehensive routine backups of one's system. But the ATI program may
satisfy your needs.
But there's a problem with your ATI program with respect to your objective
of multi-partitioning your USBEHD...
When using ATI as a routine *disk-cloning* program, it's an "all-or-nothing"
proposition. What I mean is that let's assume you've multi-partitioned your
USBEHD with three partitions, however you want to clone the contents of your
two-partitioned internal HDD to the USBEHD. Should you use ATI's
disk-cloning capability the resultant clone, i.e., the USBEHD will contain
the same two partitions of the "source" HDD, your internal HDD (the disk
space of each of the two partitions will be different because of the
different disk capacity of the "destination" drive), but you would lose the
third partition on your USBEHD. Remember, in this instance "a clone is a
clone is a clone".
Now you could get around this by using ATI's *disk-imaging* capability which
allows one to create disk images of individual partitions. But these are
disk images, i.e., files or archives that need a recovery/restore process.
They are not clones of the source drive's contents, i.e, a copy of the
source drive's contents so that the data is immediately accessible and
bootable without a recovery-type process.
(BTW, I'm not sure if the latest version 11 of ATI now has the capability of
cloning individual partitions. Perhaps someone coming across this thread
might have information on that aspect.)
On the other hand, the Casper 4 program *does* have the happy capability of
cloning individual partitions from one HDD to another HDD.
So assuming your were using that program and further assuming this doesn't
pose any problem for you because there's no present data on that external
HDD that you need (or that you couldn't copy (even temporarily) to your
internal HDD...
You could simply start "fresh" as it were and using Disk Management (Start >
right-click My Computer > Manage > Computer Management > Disk Management)
and delete the current partition(s) on that USBEHD and then create whatever
partitions you desire, presumably three as you've indicated. Then you could
clone the two individual partitions on your source (internal) HDD to the two
partitions of your USBEHD and leave the third partition free for any data
you wish to write to that partition.
Other than that if you didn't want to disrupt (lose) the data presently on
your USBEHD you would need a third-party partition management type of
program such as Partition Magic to accomplish re
artitioning the drivewithout losing data.
Anna