I am not sure whether Acronis will handle the hidden partition, it may do. Its just that the OS itself does not see it, which is the whole idea, so that this hidden data can never be damaged no matter what happens. This 'HPA' feature was added back in ATA-4 standard. It uses a special 'SET MAX ADDRESS' command to make the drive look smaller and leave several GB's at the end for a backup area. For example, my 80GB drive shows up as 72GB in Windows. I will have to investigate further whether Acronis has the capabilities to clone this hidden partition. Unfortuneately this particular computer manufacturer (TIME UK COMPUTERS) don't provide any utility for burning your own recovery media, and they got themselves a very bad reputation indeed for poor customer service owing to this and other issues (and they are now out of business).
As a last resort I could just slave the new 500GB drive to the existing drive.
Thanks again for advice!
