Migrating Data to a New Hard Disk
Chapter 4. Migrating Data
to a New Hard Disk
You can migrate your data from the old hard disk to a new one with the help
of Acronis MigrateEasy, a part or the Acronis PowerUtilities suite.
4.1 Preparing for Migration
To use the Acronis MigrateEasy application effectively you have to know at
least the basics of hard disks and how the computer works with them. Below
we will provide only the most necessary information, without covering the
technical details of inner structure of hard disks.
If you have difficulties with understanding what the application does to hard
disks, please refer to Appendices at the end of this Guide. Those appendices
contain both information on hard disk organization and on how data are
stored on it.
At the end of the Guide you will find a Glossary with explanations of terms
from this Guide that may be unknown or unclear to you.
4.2 Hard Disk Partitions and File Systems.
It would be quite inconvenient if you could only access the entire hard disk,
so a mechanism was created that allows you to divide the hard disk into
several parts for storing different types data or operating systems. This is
done by partitioning hard disks into partitions.
An operating system provides the user with ability to work with data by
supporting some type of file system on a partition. Most operating systems
support several file systems. For example, Windows 98/Me support FAT16
and FAT32 file systems, Windows NT/2000/XP support both FAT16/32 and
NTFS file systems. The popular Linux operating system supports Ext2, Ext3,
and ReiserFS (and some other) file systems.
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