Upgrading Sage machine to larger drives (system & recordings)

[popechild]

This post may be worthless and uninteresting to everyone else out there, but I thought I'd report a success doing something that had been scaring me for weeks in case anyone else is in the same boat. I had a 160gb system drive on my Vista server split into 2 c:/d: partitions (~20 for system, ~120 for non-recordings media files). Then I had a 500gb drive as e: that held all my Sage recordings. Both drives were straining at their size limits, especially the recordings drive, and the system drive was showing some nerve-wracking signs of potential drive failure that may or may not have been contributing to some instability I've been experiencing.

So yesterday I got up the nerve to try a swap - I wanted to make the 500gb drive my system c:/d: drive, and add a new 1.5tb drive as my recordings drive. I was absolutely positive I would go through hell trying to make that happen without seriously screwing something up, or Sage not recognizing its recordings, but it was smooth as butter.

I plugged the new 1.5tb drive in and copied all the files from e: to it first, then unplugged it. Then I just used a backup program (Acronis True Image) to clone the c:/d: drives to the 500gb drive (expanding both partitions in the process to a roughly 60gb/400gb split). When that completed the computer automatically shut down. I took out the previous system drive, moved the 500gb drive to its controller, and added the 1.5tb drive in the 500's place.

Lo and behold, it fired up just like it should, everything was in its proper place, and Sage correctly found all its recordings and all. Rarely in the computing world does everything seem to go exactly the way I want it to, but this was one of those occasions.

So if you're contemplating upgrading to larger drives - don't sweat it!

[wheelrandolph]

Hi Popechild,
I did the exact same thing last weekend--scared the heck out of me but turned out ok. I also had a 160gb drive with a 30gb system partition for XP and 130gb for Sage recordings. (I also have another 160 and a 320gb for recordings). After about 3yrs this drive started acting up and showed signs of failure. I decided on an 80gb dedicated system drive. I also used my Acronis TI I bought a few years ago but didn't really know how to use it(to restore an image). I made an image of just the "C" partition and sent it to a usb portable drive. I unpluged the old drive and I put the new drive in and booted to an Acronis Rescue CD I made and put the image on the new drive.

I started the machine and everthing is exactly as it was. I then tried to plug in the old drive to see what would happen and it booted ok (even with 2 XP operating systems). It shows the old drive as "H" (I think) and ignores the operating system on it. Once I make sure all is well I will reformat that old partition and use it for recordings.

I found Acronis TI a little tricky but I read their forums and figured it out.


Randy

[popechild]

Yeah, I figured I'd have to do a backup and then boot from a restore cd to move the image to the new drive like you did, but to my surprise when I was about to do that I noticed an option to "clone" the drive and it did it straight to the new drive, making it bootable and all in one move. Didn't have to boot from a cd or restore or anything else.