@ music

I've played with both arconis & macrium (free) in respect of cloning. Always going from a small existing system disc to a 1TB drive. In each case the partitions of the source were cloned to the new drive which also took the unique id of the source HD.

With both the source & clone hooked in the bios rejected the clone and would not boot from it. However the clone could be accessed in W7 via disc management and spare space on the drive could be allocated to a new volume and formatted. If the original system disc was physically disconnected the pc booted from the clone and all programmes including CS5 worked without the need for reregistering.

Currently run two system drives selectable at boot. The second system was created using a system image and restoring via the W7 installation disc. These system disc both have different unique id's and the bios is quite happy to show them as bootable.

One is my daily work sys the other is used for trailing new programmes & drivers etc. We are lucky W7 permits this. Anyone know if this also applies to W8.

Sorry to have gone further OT but there are knowledgeable users on this forum.

Geoff

"If the h/w fingerprint has changed significantly (not just a stick of ram or pci card), your OS is going to know about it (lacking the multiuser license), and so are some, but not all, of your applications. "

I've changed HDD's before with (partition not HDD) imaging. Windows 7 did ask for reactivation. Adobe also stopped working and I had to call in to get it back up, but all other programs (including vegas) were good.

I believe Vegas gets its machine ID from the CPU, perhaps the mobo also.

I remember swapping a HD on my old XP machine, restoring a Ghost image, and the OS reverted to trial mode. When I called, they wouldn't give an activation, but wanted $80 or thereabouts for a new license. Finally, on the third call, I got an activation.

@JJKizak

Where I work, no data leaves the building on any kind of physical media.



Only a very few of these drives actually failed. Most are from retired systems.

When we retire enterprise disk systems with hundreds of drives, we have a big truck come to the parking lot with a device like a shredder that grinds them into pieces about the size of wood chips.

@ john_dennis,

If the controllers are good on those drives then they can be kept and only the platters need to be destroyed. Even the shells can be kept. Why waste the good parts?

It doesn't make financial sense for drives that are four or more years old. We keep a lot of used spares but eventually the shelves fill up.

I actually replaced a contoller on a failed drive from one of the systems that I administer recently, but alas it was the spindle motor that had failed.

So today was the day.... I got a new 3TB HD for cheap (7200) and used acronis(2014) for the cloning.

My Steps were:
-Put the new drive connected via a usb port (I have a voyager s3 from newer technology hard drive adaptor)

-Accessed the computer management disk application to format the drive

-Used acronis and created a bootable CD (I didn't need this but in case my old drive would crash)

-Then used acronis to image the old drive to the new drive. I got a few errors from acronis that wasn't able to read some sectors (I got about 7 errors). I did do a chkdsk prior but it reported the drive was good. I didn't want to use HDD regenerator or some other software to correct the error in case I wouldn't be able to use the drive again.

-Rebooted the pc to make sure the new drive was well partitioned as the old drive. All ok.

-I removed my original drive and swapped it with the new drive.

Windows XP:
-Although I don't use XP anymore, I kick the tires and it worked.

Windows 7
-Pretty much everything worked. I loaded up vegas 12 and it gives me a disclaimer to accept...everytime I start it. NewblueFX gave me problems and I had to re-register them. All else was ok!
CS5.5, DVDa all okay..and a bunch of other programs all okay.

Windows Vista
What a pain. No good.
I stopped using Vista about a few months back but I still had some licensed apps that I might use.
I get errors on top of errors before I can even log on..something about a nvvsrv.exe and that I had to activate my license (but there was no dialog box to enter it!).

Since I now have acronis, does it re-partition and reallocate disc space? I had partition magic at one time and loved it..

Okay I think I found my problem..I just don't know how to fix it.

When I boot in Vista, the drive letter is D. All my programs and the OS were installed on drive C.
I can't access the computer management screen in Vista because it cannot create the "snap-in".

When I boot in Vista, drive C shows my XP os

How else can I change the drive letter? Maybe I should just zap XP...

thanks!