why don't you just move it to the external HDD

You will need to move it.

When it comes to Restore - It must NOT be on the drive that you hope to restore.

It needs to be on.

An external HD,second internal HD or a series of DVDs.

Did a lot of thinking last night, and this is what I think I must do. Just want to verify that this is the correct procedure.

1. Move the 9/2 backup from C (internal drive) to K (external drive).

2. Delete the July 2009 backup from K (external drive).

3. Format C (internal drive) to remove the July 2009 backup and leave the new C drive blank.

4. Use Acronis to restore 9/2 backup to C drive.

Does this sound correct? If so, I will need instructions for formatting the C drive. Okay, I'll use Google and try to find out how to do this correctly. Just don't want to lose the backup of 9/2 as this contains the OS and all programs and settings as of that date, and this is what I want on the C drive.

Thanks again. I have no idea why I chose to restore the July 2009 backup---that was stupid.

Is the 9/2 backup a complete image of the drive?

Zep makes a good point. Check the sizes of the backup files. Is it possible that the 9/2 backup is an incremental image? If it's smaller than the earlier one, it may be that the early image is a full backup and the latter one is just the changes since the first one. If that's the case, you would not be able to recover if you delete the earlier image.

No, the 9/2 backup is a complete image. I did it when I realized the HDD was failing in anticipation of doing this.
The 9/2 backup is larger than the other one.

You should consider just renaming the July 2009 file so it cannot be restored but is available should you hit a snag with 9/2. Just change the 3 letter suffix, you can then change back if necessary or delete once you have your computer set up with 9/2.

The other thing I don't understand is the steps in restoring an image from Acronis. You could Google that last sentence and find an answer. I would think you don't have to reformat and restoring the image just copies over the current data. But I'm not sure of the procedure. Or others that have done it before may know.

Yes, I don't really understand this, either (Acronis). When I installed the new HDD, it was formatted in NTFS and blank, ready to go. I mistakenly chose the 7/09 backup to restore. It restored perfectly, but, of course, nothing is updated, and I have removed some programs and added others since that date. I suppose I could do a complete image backup of this to the external drive and start over with my restore. Of course, this would not remove it from the internal HDD. Nothing I have found has answered that question. I have found directions on Acronis to be quite vague and not at all specific.

Owbist, I have already deleted all other backups from the external drive other than the one of 9/2/10.

Note that item 1 in the article mentions usb port, so to me that means I can boot from the external drive and it will just restore. My version of Acronis is 2009, which is slightly different from the one being quoted from. Would you all agree that I can enter BIOS and choose the external hard drive to boot from? I hope I'm reading this correctly.

Here is a link that might be useful: Restoring from Acronis

Okay, USB port was listed in boot order, but computer would not boot from same. So I used an Acronis bootable disk and went ahead and started the restore process from it. What I did not realize is that Acronis will wipe the existing disk before doing the restore. So my worrying about reformatting before restoring was for naught. It is now validating and will soon start the restoration process. I will post once more when the process is complete. I do find the Acronis program to be slow to respond to commands, and their directions are not for "noobies", but it is a good program.

Hooray! Restore is finished and all is well. Avast updated as did drivers for my cordless mouse and keyboard.

Just one thing I must investigate. The hard drive capacity is shown as 500.11GB, but C drive shows only 232GB. Where is the rest of the capacity? Will open BelArc and see what that shows me.

Congratulations!

I have never used this program, might be worth a look.

Identify how much disk space you're using with WinDirStat. Based on the Linux application KDirStat, this great piece of freeware offers you an informative visual display of your hard-drive usage.

zep516

Here is a link that might be useful: WinDirStat

You might take a look at disk management (right click my computer select manage and then disk management)and see if it tells you anything.

This is sort of weird. Clicking on My Computer shows C as total size 232GB. It shows free space of 188GB. However, BelArc shows C:NTFS on drive 0 250.03GB and 200.80 GB free under Local Drive Volumes. Everything that gives the model and capacity of the HDD show it as 500.11GB. No, I do not have enough on it to fill over half of it. So where is this "free" 200GB located? All other local disks (optical, etc) are shown as E, F, G, H, I, & K. I do not have the external drive connected, so it does not show. I used to have a "D" partition, which was my rescue partition which came on the computer. I made rescue disks, but I never got rid of the "D" partition, but now it does not seem to exist. I'm not really worried about running out of storage space, but I surely would like to know where this 200GB of "free" space is. I will download and install the program Zep recommends, but I do not think it will show anything unexpected.

By the way, Device Manager shows everything working normally, and nothing shows up under disk management that seems out of place.

bob414, I failed to click on disk management as you suggested after opening manage, so here's what I found when I did do that:

two boxes, the first labeled HP Pavilion 232.85GB NTFS
the second box simply said 232.90GB unallocated
It also showed 465.76GB Online.

So how can the unallocated amount be formatted NTFS and shown as part of "C"?

I downloaded that program, very small and nice. Takes a bit of time to get use to it,

Here's a screen shot of it,

{{gwi:1496064}}

zep

If you right click on the HP Pavilion 232.85GB NTFS section and choose 'extend' it should extend itself through the unallocated sector. If that sector is not formatted in NTSF format you may have to right click on it and format it in NTSF.

Bob, when I right click on HP Pavilion I get these choices:
Open, Explore, Change Drive Letter and Paths, Properties, and Help. No "extend" choice. This is XP SP3.

Zep, thanks. That looks like a useful program and I will give it a try.

My fault. I was thinking Vista or Win 7.

"This is sort of weird. Clicking on My Computer shows C as total size 232GB. It shows free space of 188GB. However, BelArc shows C:NTFS on drive 0 250.03GB and 200.80 GB free under Local Drive Volumes."

That's probably due to using different definitions of GB. People have ten fingers, so we count in multiples of ten, but computers only have two fingers, so they count in multiples of two.

To computer people, 1 KB is 210 or 1024, 1 MB is 220 or 1,048,576 and GB is 230 or 1,048,576. But people tend to think in terms of thousand, million and billion (103, 106 and 109), so drive manufacturers will often use 1,000,000 to mean GB instead of 1,048,576. MS apparently uses base 2 for its calculations and Belarc apparently uses base 10. Hmm, those numbers don't quite match using the conversion factors, but that's probably part of it.

When you restored the drive, did you have the option to use all available space? If not, there are programs available that will extend an existing partition or you can format the other partition and use it as a second drive (although you need to keep in mind that it's physically on the same device, so don't use it for backups).

232.90GB The "unallocated" space is free space.

Unallocated space, sometimes called "free space", is logical space on a hard drive that the operating system, e.g Windows, can write to. To put it another way it is the opposite of "allocated" space, which is where the operating system has already written files to.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives_06.htm

bpgreen, I do not recall that Acronis gave the option to use all available space. Don't think I'd want to use this "unallocated space" as a second drive. I'd really like to merge the two into one partition, if possible. I'll try to find a program that does this, or if you know of one or more, I'd appreciate your posting a link to it.

At any rate, I'm just thankful that I didn't lose the OS and all my music, pictures, etc. I guess I just was so unsure of myself that I didn't trust Acronis to do the full restoration without my doing something extra.

I just tried a search for partition resize and got lots of hits and many of them seem to be for free/open source partition resizing software.

I've used terabyte unlimited's image software and I think I may have downloaded their partition program but didn't want to have a boot manager load each time so I removed it (but I think it kept the larger partition; I can't remember because it has been a long time).

Here is a link that might be useful: Google for partition resize

Yes, I've found lots of good articles. After reading some, I think I just won't do anything for now until such time as I might need the space. Seems it will make maintenance easier not to have it all in one place.

So I'm content that all is well, and I again thank everyone for the "hand holding".

I tried this on my wife's computer which has xp so I feel sure that it will work for you. I couldn't do the final step because she didn't have the unallocated space but the microsoft website says it works in xp.
Unless you are very uncomfortable working in a command window it's not difficult at all.
Open a command window - start > run > command
At the prompt type 'diskpart' (don't enter the quotes in any of these steps)
at the diskpart prompt type 'list volume'
this will list the sections on your disk. You want the number of the section with your c drive.
type 'select volume x' where x is the number with your c drive.
It will state that the one you entered is the active volume.
type 'extend' at the prompt
type 'exit' and you are through.