Install new hard drive in Aspire R7

I need to install a bigger hard drive (going from 500gb to 2tb) in an Aspire R7. This version has the little Kingston SSD drive.

 

I took it in to Best Buy (where we bought it) and talked to the Geek Squad.

 

He said I would need to order 'Recovery Disc' from Acer, then completely reinstall everything after using the 'Recovery Disc'.

 

1. I can create 'Recovery Disc' using Windows 8.1, so not sure why I need to order it.

2. I have a image copy of the current hard drive.

 

I have done this many times in the past in desktops and simply restored the image copy to the hard drive and booted up.

 

Is there any reason that I can't use an image restore to the new hard drive in a laptop??

 

Thanks.

Filofilo

Re: acer has a unhide hidden erecovery partition ‎Acer has a hidden recover partition if you are starting fresh, there is a 10GB partition is the factory recovery partition. it lets you press alt+F10 to re-install a fresh copy of the OS and also to burn the recovery disks. however if there is a lot of free space you could shrink it to the size of the actual data in it using diskmgmt.msc or similar. the only time you would want to get rid of it is if you upgrade to a different OS, never want to go back, and have a full install copy of the new OS not an upgrade copy. the other one is created by the OS for error recovery.

scrambler

There is one thing I am unclear about.

You say you are upgrading from a 500GB to a 2 TB, and you also say your model has the SSD.

 

So how many drives do you have in, and which one has the OS?

 

If you have the OS on a small SSD and you have a second hard drive of 500GBfor your data that you want to change to a 2 TB, you can simply connect the 2TB with an external enclosure, clone the 500GB to the 2TB drive, then swap the disks.

 

But we need to know more to offer advice here

This is where the Geek Squad confused me.

When I go to 'disk management' it shows two drives.

 

Disk 1 with two partitions. 7.46gb and 14.90 gb.

Disk 2 with five partitions. 400mb Recovery, 300 mb EFI, 18.76gb Recovery, C: 224.90gb, 221.29gb

 

He said Disk 1 is a small specialized SSD. Disk 2 is the 500gb.

He said this is a Raid setup, and I would have to reinstall everything to the new drive, that I couldn't simply image copy (I use Image For Windows) and reload the image to the new drive. (This is what I've done for multiple computers over the years).

 

The image copy contains all the partitions including the recoveries and EFI.

 

He said I would have to order 'recovery disk' from Acer to start the installation process.

Assuming that I really have to reinstall everything, I would think that the 'recovery disk' that I created using 8.1 would do the trick.

 

This is my daughters machine and we bought a second one for my wife about 2 months later and it only has a 1tb drive, so that just adds to my confusion.

 

scrambler

From what you are saying, it looks like the SSD is very small and probably used as a cache, but the OS is actually on the second drive.

 

If so, I am not 100% sure if the link between the OS and the small SSD would suffer from cloning the disk2 onto a 2 TB.

 

But even if it did, the process should be harmless as you would not be touching the original 500GB disk. So even if the cloning did not work, you coul always put the 500GB back and try a different approach.

 

So as far as keeping the same configuration with the 2TB instead of the 500GB, It looks like you should be able to put the 2TB in an enclosure, Use cloning SW to clone the 500GB onto the 2TB, Then open the machine, remove the 500GB and plug the 2TB in its place.

Note:When cloning from a 500GB to a 2TB, some cloning SW will scale all partitions the same way (x4 here), you usually have a manual mode that allows you to not scale the smaller partitions like the recovery, EFI... and only scale the C: and D, OS and data partition.

 

That being said, if you only have a very small SSD (I believe an MSATA) used as a cache, you may want to consider acquiring a decent MSATA of 128GB or 256GB, and make it the OS drive and then just use the 2TB for data.

 

In that case you would need to do a full OS install onto the new SSD, but you should be able to create a recovery USB drive for that.

There was a thread about the process for doing just that on this forum:

http://community.acer.com/t5/2014-Archives/Aspire-R7-572-Teardown/m-p/217869#M36147