Tip for Acronis and Cloning to a 750GB Hard Drive

[ARD]

I just bought a Hitachi 7k750 hard drive to upgrade the old 7k500 in my T500 running Windows 7 Ultimate 64. I used the Acronis True Image Home 2012 boot CD that I burned to clone the 500GB to the new 750GB. The 750GB hard drive had the Advanced Format formatting. This post is a tip for those who may wish to clone to larger hard drives and won't have to beat their heads against the wall trying to resolve the issue that will later appear.

The clone process went well with no issues. The new drive with Windows 7 Ultimate 64 booted up fine. All was well until I installed a program a few days later. The install would hang at 100% CPU usage and I would have to hard reset the T500. I finally uninstalled it thinking it was a badly coded app. A few days later, I checked out Windows Update and it just suddenly said it could not update because the update service was not running. After verifying that indeed it was running, I stopped and started the Update service, the BITS service and the crypto service as well as re-registering the associated DLLs.
I started to get a little worried and annoyed because all the solutions that I found online for the issue did not resolve it. Specifically, the error message was:

"Windows update cannot currently check for updates because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer."

Also it randomly gave out error code 8024A000. I was about to clean install Windows when I found this page at Microsoft:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... af1c529336

In it, a user was experiencing the same issue but was able to resolve it by installing Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver which can be found here:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... pe=Drivers

After installing and rebooting, Windows installed the drivers, but indicated that it failed. I freaked out, and immediately checked out Windows Update expecting to see the same error, but it ran beautifully. At last I was able to update. My issue was fixed.
Amazing how the Advanced Format can wreak havok with the operating system without the drivers. Maybe you the reader already knew of this, but I didn't. Its quite possible someone else doesn't either. I hope this helps that person with the same predicament.

[ausmike]

yips.... u are so right = very frustrating and often 'freakish' when u things like Windows Update Error for no reason...... I had similar issue(s) with my W500 at that time with a 500GB drive that had NCQ format compliance (wd black series I think) ,,,,,,or chould been a Hit with NCQ capable.....
So I wrecked my little brain and nothing seemed to fix it .. so off I sent many hours with MS Level II support & Lenovo Support (even less usefull) ,,,,,,

And than I ended up calling a friend of friend @ intel ,,,,since at the time I was testing their THEN NEW 500 series SSD,,,,,, and WAHLA !!! ..... all came together. However I got told at that time (many a months ago now) that those "updates" would be made as MANDATORY UPDATE with MS Windown UPDATES Process >thus any machines with ACHI/RAID with applicable intel contorller chips + NCQ compatable HDs....= be updated. Suprise Suprise,AFAIK , its not shown up on any on my WINDOWS UPDATES yet (maybe since I dont have those W or T series machines now so I dont need them anyways) ,,, but yeah - fully agree - waisted time very frustrated & painfull process!

Cheers