Cloning drive and PQSERVICE partition

oldyellr

I have an Acer Aspire 5100 laptop running Windows 7. The 120 GB hard drive is close to full and I've purchased a 1TB drive I want to clone it to using Macrium Reflect - Free Edition and a USB/SATA cable. This software allows me to custom resize partitions. There are 3 partitions, PQSERVICE (hidden) about 10 GB, C: ACER, about 52 GB and DATA, about 52 GB. I'll be expanding C: and to fill the new drive, but do I need to make the PQSERVICE partition bigger or just leave it as is. It's about 2/3 full. I've used the free Acronis versions for WD and Seagate before and they just increase all the partitions proportionally, but that software isn't working for me on this laptop for some reason.

philetus

PQSERVICE is part of your system restore and  D probably contains more of it. If you made system restore disks or you don't care about system restore, you can delete them. If you do care, you should clone the HDD as it is without changing the size of the partitions. 

 

oldyellr

I'm cloning the original 120 GB hard drive to a new 1 TB hard drive to get more disk space, so naturally, the C: and partitions will be a lot bigger. So, to confirm what you're saying, the PQSERVICE partition does not need to be bigger and I should just leave it the same size?

philetus

Yes. If you change the size factory recovery probably won't work. No the partitions will not be bigger because you are cloning to a bigger drive. Cloning makes an exact copy of the drive you're cloning.After it's done, you can go to Disk Management and expand your C drive into the free space.

 

If your recovery drive works, you could make the recovery DVDs or a recovery flask drive, which will restore the recovery partitions along with the system, and you would be able to restore it to factory from them.What I did was clone to my SSD and put the original HDD away safely.

oldyellr

I'm familiar with two disk cloning programs, the free versions of Acronis available from Western Digital and Seagate, which expand all the partitions proportionally to the new, bigger drive, and now I'll be using Macrium Reflect, free edition, which allows you to resize the partitions to fit the new, bigger, drive. All the examples I've seen, they clone the hidden recovery partition as is and expand the other partition(s) to fill the new drive.

philetus

Sounds good to me.

oldyellr

Just following up. I'm now running off the new cloned 1TB drive with no problems. I decided to expand the hidden PQSERVICE partition from 9.76 GB to 20 GB just in case the new big drive needed more space as it filled up, and expanded the C: and drive partitions to equally fill the rest of the space.  Macrium Reflect performed flawlessly. Highly recommended!