Swapping Hard Drive in Acer Revo

The Acer Aspire Revo has a lot of potential for a home media player but the 160gb hard drive won't be large enough for everybody.

I spotted a special offer on a Iomega Prestige 500gb Portable Hard Drive which contains (in my case) a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 drive, model ST9500325AS .

I already had a working installation of Windows 7 RC, so here's how I swapped the hard drives: -

1. Download the Clonezilla ISO file (I used clonezilla-live-1.2.2-14.iso) and install it to USB stick via Unetbootin.


2. Boot Revo with Clonezilla USB stick attached & USB Hard Drive attached.


3. Select “device-device disk/partition to disk/partition” and choose the 160gb internal hard drive (/dev/sda) as the source and the 500gb USB hard drive (/dev/sdb) as the target.


4. Confirm (it asks a few times!) and then wait for cloning to be complete. This will take a long time, as it copies all partitions (on my original hard drive I had 4 partitions – Windows 7 NTFS, Linux ext3, Data NTFS and Linux swap).


5. Open the Iomega USB drive (two screws at the back) and take out the Seagate 500gb hard drive.


6. Open the Revo & Swap the hard drives (see forum post here).


7. Swap the drives and re-assemble the Revo and portable hard drive.


8. Boot up the Revo with the new hard drive in it – it should boot straight up.


9. Extend the partitions to make use of the full 500gb space (this can be done in Windows 7 by going to "Computer" then "Manage". Go to "Storage" then "Disk Management" and then right-click the drive before selecting "Extend Volume").


10. Put 160gb hard drive into Iomega case & re-partition hard drive.

Now I have a Revo with lots of storage space, and a spare 160gb portable hard drive for backups etc.