Re: External Hard Drive

I bought an 250 GB Iomega external hard drive last month and cloned my little 30 GB system using Acronis True Image. It took about two hours to clone. I've tried to research how to do things like this but I'm really busy with my two little boys, 8 months old and almost 3 years old. I'm curious about a couple things you said. One is the partitioning. When I cloned my system the Acronis software made two partitions on the Iomega just like my hard drive. The extra partition is for recovery and I've since learned that I don't need that extra recovery partition because Acronis made an exact clone of my system. An Acronis techie told me that (after I did the cloning). Why do you partition? To put the recovery partition back on your hard drive?

Also, when you say "a couple of mouse clicks" do you mean that you copy and paste the contents of your external hard drive over to your newly formatted and partitioned main drive? How long does it take to complete?

I used to format and reinstall my Windows 98 a couple times a year way back when and I miss doing that. We've had this "new" Gateway computer for a year now and I would like to reformat it. I know it's cluttered up even though it's running fine.

Could you explain these things to me?

Talahasee wrote:
On Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:51:36 GMT, steve <steve@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


I know this isn't the place to ask but I'd appreciate any opinions on
a Vaio external hard drive(10 gb). Thanks



Can't vouch for the brand.

However, my 2 Cents would be a 10 Gb hdd is kinda small.

My recommendations would be do as I did.

Get yourself a 60 or 80 Gb hdd, (mine's an 80) partition as
2 drives, format it, and slap it into an external hdd
enclosure. Same end result as an external hard drive, but
cheaper.

As for the merits of external storage, I recommend it
highly. You can back up to it almost instantly, and when you
want to format/reinstall your hard drive, you just turn off
the external drive.

I've reformatted my main drive a dozen times since I've had
my external drive, and all I do is turn it off, partition,
format, install, and turn it back on. That way, once my OS
is installed, some 90 % of my install software is on my
backup drive, and ready to go with a couple of mouse clicks.


Hope that helps.

Good luck!


Tallahassee
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Format 500GB to FAT32
    ... How can this be if the disc is already an FAT32 volume? ... If I NTFS format it will it be readable from the command prompt ... Acronis and the DOS version of Ghost 2003 will quite happily read/write NTFS partitions. ... XP has a block on formatting larger disk partitions as FAT32, though will read/write them, but both Acronis and Ghost will happily restore an empty FAT32 partition of any size to a partition of any size within the FAT 32 limits. ...
    (uk.comp.misc)
  • Re: hd failure
    ... well I bought some drive utilities from Acronis, it's new to me so maybe I ... a quick format so I can explore the drive, it just baffles me the drive is ... cost but highly effective backup medium. ... into two seperate partitions, only one partition has been affected, the ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Hard Drive ?
    ... Acronis will do it fine. ... populate the new partition from the image. ... of Ultimate 64 back on the drive. ... BUT - I cannot format the Ultimate 64 drive, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.general)
  • Re: Hard Drive ?
    ... Acronis will do it fine. ... populate the new partition from the image. ... of Ultimate 64 back on the drive. ... BUT - I cannot format the Ultimate 64 drive, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.general)
  • Re: HD problems on HP Pavillion ze5602ea notebook
    ... I had only created a single 7 gig partition before, so the rest of the drive ... was RAW and unformatted (it wouldnt format from XP setup remember) So after ... Management I tried to format it, after half an hour it hadnt done anything ... > 30GB drives are not terribly expensive any more. ...
    (comp.sys.hp.hardware)
Loading