Cloning and partitioning system drive

I have a Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1TB drive that will be going into my system this weekend.

Firstly I need to clone my exisiting 74GB Raptor to the Samsung drive. I assume I can use Acronis True Image 11 Home to do this:

Complete hard disk drive copy, cloning and image backup software: computer files and disk copying

Now, I would like to have 2, maybe 3, partitions on the 1TB drive (eg. 2 x 500GB partitions). Would I need to create partitions on the 1TB drive before I clone the system drive? Or would the True Image software be able to clone the 74GB Raptor into a 500GB partition on the Samsung drive? Or is this something that I would need to do afterwards. My OS is Vista 64-bit.

Ideally I would just like to clone my Raptor and have the software ask me how big I wanted the partition to be. I'm also assuming that Vista can extend and create new partitions on a drive.

I have opnly used Welcome to Future Systems Solutions and I just cloned drive A to Dtrive B (unformatted) then used something like partition magic to resize the partitions as required. (You didn't say if the raptor had multiple partitions.)

The Acronis website is a bit lite on how it clones, but I guess it is the same way.

However if I was doing it, I would use a Linux live CD and the dd command to clone the raptor to the new drive (so that the source disk isn't actually mounted) and then use something like GPARTED to resize the partitions. I'd then boot off the new disk and create the file systems on the new partions with the appropriate Windows format command.

The Raptor is a single partition. I've been reading the Acronis FAQ today and it seems that the 'clone' facility on the product allows you to extend the partition on the target drive. So, hopefully, it should all work.

Acronis lets you adjust the partitions and their sizes during the cloning process.

Thanks for the help.

I've just got rid of my two Raptors and I've split the 1TB Samsung into two 465GB partitions (drive C and drive D). Everything went very smoothly with Acronis True Image 11 Home and its wizard-driven interface ensured that I made no mistakes!

The whole process took around an hour from start to finish and that includes installing and removing drives.