[PLUG] I hate Acronis...

Michael Christopher Robinson michael at robinson-west.com
Tue Jun 20 18:28:55 UTC 2017


Acronis Trueimage WD is a free tool from western digital that is
supposed to let you clone your old hard drive to a new larger hard
drive.  Great, except the idiot engineers who made it require a 
working Windows system to use it.  Yo dudes, I am running Linux.  
A decent cloning tool works from a bootable CD, DVD, or USB key.  
I want to wipe Linux completely off of the new drive Thursday 
and restore Windows 10 without putting the old hard drive in 
it's place.

I am borrowing this laptop.  I took the hard drive out of this HP 
650, a 320G seagate, and replaced it with a WD Blue 500G drive.  I 
installed Fedora 24 via livecd and upgraded to Fedora 25 via dnf.  
I need the laptop for a free Python course at Tech Academy Wednesday.  

I have to do the cloning under Linux, probably from a livecd.  This
laptop can't boot Windows from a USB connected hard drive and there
are no eSATA ports.

The alternative to cloning of course is to swap the old hard drive 
back into the laptop.  Sadly, there is no way to install two hard
drives to this laptop, thanks HP.  The laptop is an HP 650 i3 
laptop.  It has 4G of ram.

I can think of using dd from a Linux livecd with the old drive in a 
USB enclosure and the new drive inside the laptop.  Using dd to
confidentially erase the new drive, no problem.  The problem comes
up when you try to use dd to copy the old drive which is 320G to the
new drive which is 500G.  If I use Linux level support of NTFS, the
support may not be good enough and I may end up with less than stellar
results.  Another problem with using dd, you waste 180G because the
partitions aren't resiozed appropriately.



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