A short while back, a friend was telling me how he greatly improved the performance of his laptop by upgrading his hard drive to a faster model-interesting. Plus, I have been tinkering with Linux, wishing that I had enough space on my laptop to do a dual boot-But it would be a tight squeeze; unless I had a larger faster HD! After all, it is Christmas! But it seemed like a lot of work, 1600+ executable files, all would have to be put back in place on a new drive to work right. But, I did have Drive Image backup software, hummm, I wonder…

Hardware: Dell Inspiron 8500 Laptop-- Original drive, 40GB 5400 RPM drive. Upgrading to a 60 GB 7200 RPM drive, to get a little more free space, perhaps to get a performance boost, and to have space for a Linux test platform.

Software: Windows XP Pro, Drive Image 7 for backup, Mandrake Linux 10.1

Plan: Drive Image 7 provides both a backup/restore tool, and a drive copy tool. For my task of replacing the hard drive and making it work like the original system, the drive copy was the simplest option (I have a PCM/CIA slot adapter that allows attaching a laptop drive externally.) But I decided to do a backup from the original drive, to a third drive, then restore to the new drive. This process seemed a good test of the backup restore capabilities of Drive Image, and left a safe set of data on the third drive so I could use the old laptop drive for other tests without the risk of losing the system setup data.

Overview: I had previously installed Drive Image 7, and don't remember much about that, except that it requires the installation of the Microsoft ".Net" environment. As I recall, it was pretty straightforward. The DI-7 package included a copy of the older software for Win9x/ME, as version 7 is for use on Win 2000 and XP only. My laptop hard drive has 3 partitions, all these were backed up at once just be checking the drives from the list in the backup wizard. The system drive was backed up to an external USB 2 hard drive. Restore had to be done one partition at a time, possibly because the partitions were not the same size as on the original system drive. Restoring the individual partitions one at a time was not completely automatic, but worked fine, just selecting each data packet, and assigning it a destination partition.

Process:
Step one: Plug in the external USB drive, clean off enough space to save the data from the original system drive. Then, I used DI-7 to do a complete backup of all three partitions on the original system drive. Backup and restore ran at about 500MB per minute, using validate/verify data both directions. I had just over 22GB to save, which compressed to 18GB during backup, so each process (backup and restore) took about 45 minutes.

Step two: partition the new drive by plugging it into the PCM slot adapter, and using Windows Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management. I did not "name" the partitions, even though it is supported in the Disk Management tool. If I had named the partitions corresponding to the names of the old partitions, it might have aided in the restore process in step four. I partitioned to three sections, each somewhat larger than the original, and reserved 7GB for future Linux install. This step likely could be combined with step 4, because the DI-7 restore environment offers the option of removing and adding partitions to the restore target drive.

Step three: Swap the hardware. The details here are just for my particular laptop, but the total effort should be pretty similar for most machines. The drive on the Inspiron is installed in a small tray that is held in the case by one small screw. After this tray is removed, the hard drive is removed from the tray by removing 4 more screws. There is a small 40? pin adapter that slips over the pins on the drive, and mounts to the case with a small card-connector. I just removed the drive from the tray, and the 40 pin adapter from the old drive, and reversed the procedure to mount the new drive. It is probably a good idea to set aside a half-hour or so for this exercise so remove/reinstall is uninterrupted to avoid getting things upside down.

Step four: Re-plug in the external USB drive, Boot with the DI-7 CD to a "restore environment" that only has the functions necessary to restore the data from the original data images. Backup of a drive creates one compressed file for each partition backed up. During restore, Drive Image was unable to automatically assign the saved data packages to the target partitions, so I had to pick "restore one drive at a time" from the menu, and assign each saved file to a specific partition. The restore went smoothly, then I unplugged the USB drive and rebooted. Windows booted, and detected new hardware, Zone alarm complained that a "New Network was found" and wanted to know whether to trust it. I gave permission to trust it, and then had to reboot again. So far, everything I have tested is working well.

Results:
Speed: Of course, I didn't do any time tests on the old drive to benchmark the new setup, but it does seem noticeably faster.
Space: I added about 5GB to my data partition, about 7GB to the system and applications area, and have 7 GB left for Linux.
Extra data drive: Of course, if needed I have the 40 GB original drive that I plan to add to a USB enclosure, for portable storage.

Investment: New 60GB drive, $148 with shipping from New Egg. Drive Image 7, around $40 various places. Ready to buy, but not purchased yet, Meritline.com has an external USB-2 drive enclosure for $17 + shipping. Mandrake Linux 10.1, free download.

Afterthoughts: It occurs to me that Drive Image can be used as a somewhat clumsy, but probably pretty safe repartitioning software, given that you have storage available for backup. Just back it up, partition, and restore. The Linux install went OK, not completely functional, but promising. Perhaps a future small article for this. Also, I still have to order the USB kit to hold the old drive.