Acronis True Image Question

[Debbie]

Since thre has been no responce from Acronis I taught that Ill ask the question here:
I always keep an image of my hard drive.
Just a couple of days ago my C: drive started showing me dying symptoms. So off I went and bought a new drive.
The old drive had a capacity of 400GB but the new drive had 500GB. After tranfering the image from the 400GB drive on to the 500GB drive, I found that a partition has been created. I tried all I could to join the partition, Partition Magic and the lot bud haven't managed.
Is there a way that I can produce an image that would not cause a patition on another larger drive ?

[Fat Tone]

In principle you don't want to join partitions, what you need to do is expand your 400GB partition in to the free space.

[Debbie]

In principle you don't want to join partitions, what you need to do is expand your 400GB partition in to the free space.

That's exactly what I wanted to do. Sorry for my bad terminoloy.

[UtwigMU]

You need to boot with Acronis disk director, PQ partition magic or Knoppix (GNUParted) and enlarge partition to go over entire 500GB drive.

What I usually did was:
A) Boot knoppix, use dd_rescue (dying drive): dd_rescue /dev/sdg /dev/sdf (copy from g to f drive), then boot Partition magic and enlarge partition
B) Using Acronis make it resize partitions during copy

[Dr Mordrid]

I've been playing with the freeware Easeus Partition Master and it's pretty good too. Small and clean. 32 bit only though. They also make a drive imager.

[cjolley]

Gparted Live is your best friend for this.
Just expand the partition. Simple as pie. No worries. Almost any file system.

PS. I am a happily paying customer of Acronis Disk Director, have been for years. It's saved my bacon several times.
But for just expanding a partition. Gparted, the live CD, is the way to go.

PPS Since you already have the image, you have the luxury of experimenting

[High_Jumbllama]

Mine has always resized on the fly when the drive was empty. This is with versions 11 and 2010.

[Debbie]

Thank you all for your very usefull advice.