[krypto]

Vlad, which version of Acronis did you use? I think the different versions have different drivers. It failed when I ran under native IDE, which I need to set for most utilities to run. It worked when running as AHCI. Go figure?

I found the following system for replacing the primary drive with(c: sys and d: data):
- no loss of backups
- no loss of data
- no rebuild/reinstall
- no stuffing around
- takes under 30 mins

On my system it worked on SATA drives running AHCI. Also my primary data drive was practically empty.

This won't work if your primary drive has failed as you need to image it. I'm also not sure if would work restoring an old image if data/drives have changed.

Steps
1. Create a Acronis recovery disk.
2. Disconnect all data drives
3. Leave the primary drive with c: sys and d: data connected.
4. Connect your replacement drive, I used the next sata port
5. Boot from the recovery disk
6. Clone disk - make sure to leave the sys partition as 20GB. I went from a 250GB to 500GB and used custom resize to allocate the remainder of the disk to d:
7. Remove the old disk and connect the new disk to the same sata port
8. Reboot with only sys attached. I did this to check that it worked and got a minor error message
9. Shutdown
10. Reattach all other data drives
11. Reboot
12. Finished