I have used the Seagate DiscWizard Acronis True Image imaging software before, and I rather like it. However it failed for me on bootup recently from both Hiren’s BootCD and from Falcon Four’s Ultimate Boot CD – this of course I want to clearly point out is not the fault of the disks, they just provide the software all in one neat little package. I have a feeling the imaging software is no longer a viable option as it is not updated enough to handle the latest mother board chipsets or something to that effect. Therefore the next option was to look for a different free alternative.

Error Messages
These are the error messages I received while trying to run DiscWizard:

  • acronis: cannot open module ‘st’: no such file or directory
  • acronis: insmod: error inserting ‘/lib/modules/floppy.ko’: -1 No such device: No such device
After getting the errors the disk would spin down and not spin back up again… I started searching for why and I couldn’t find a better explanation than: “You need to download the latest software”. Okay, well I did, just not a new version of DiscWizard which I don’t think is exactly free.
Clone your drive with: EaseUS Disk Copy 2.3.1
This was very easy to install and use. My favorite thing about it is it let me install the software to a USB drive as a bootable USB drive. No disk to burn! Fantastic. Running the software was simple and very straight forward. Choose your source disk and choose your destination disk. Done.
Gotcha
After I cloned my smaller drive to a larger drive, I had unallocated space. Apparently windows doesn’t let you increase/extend the size of your system/boot drive for some reason I am not interested in understanding. Frankly it should be an option because other software can do it – why can’t windows?
Extending your System Drive with: Partition Wizard 8
I would have recommended EaseUS’s Partition Manager, but it kept trying to install all kinds of other software on my system except the partition manager. That gets very annoying after a few screens, so I canceled the installer. I found Partition Wizard 8 which does not require a boot CD and you can just run it straight from windows. Once again very straight forward. Select your partition, right click for context menu, select extend, move the slider bar all the way to the right, press OK, press Apply and you are pretty much done.
Conclusion
Thank you to all of the freeware that’s out there. Disk cloning and changing the expanse of a volume is really not a day to day thing – so not having to pay for software for a one time deal if very nice.

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