Gaming Cloning TO an "advanced format" drive?

[Rydian]

So I currently have a 500GB SATA drive with Windows 7 installed, and got a 2TB drive, and I want to move to it. I have two concerns.


[*]

That's my current partitioning setup (the unallocated is reserved for linux-swap). I'd like the new drive to be the same sort of thing, almost half and half... so I can't really copy the drive as-is because the first partition would only have a certain size anyways.

What would be the best way to do this? I could copy the contents of I:\ over to a temporary folder and then when I'm on the new drive make a partition for it and copy it's contents back, but I have a lot of individual text files on that drive, making a ton of overhead as far as an in-OS file-by-file copy is concerned... is there a cloning software (like some sort of liveCD) that would be faster than my idea, while still allowing me to make the partitions on the new drive a certain size?


[*]The drive is an "advanced format" drive, and the sticker on the drive itself states that XP and cloning software users should use the drive manufacturer's "aligning" utility for best performance.

Does this mean I can go ahead and clone with whatever sort of software, and I just need to run the alignment tool afterwards?

 

[marcus134]

you can simply use a disk cloning software, it's very simple.
1. connect both drive to your computer
2. boot with the live disk, usb or floppy
3. follow the on-screen instructions

I personally enjoy acronis trueimage(paid) live disk, but you're free to try any software you like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_cloning_software (look for the platform independent one)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of...note-RawSmart-0

 

[raulpica]

I advise Macrium Reflect. Works like a charm, and it's freeware.

You can do it anyway. Clone the partitions individually with Reflect, and give them a new size while re-importing them.

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storag...fmt/WDAlign.png
Try doing 2 first. If it isn't aligned, align it.

After that, clone the drive, and check back. If it needs re-aligning, do it

 

[Rydian]

you can simply use a disk cloning software, it's very simple.
1. connect both drive to your computer
2. boot with the live disk, usb or floppy
3. follow the on-screen instructions

I personally enjoy acronis trueimage(paid) live disk, but you're free to try any software you like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_cloning_software (look for the platform independent one)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of...note-RawSmart-0I cannot and do not want to use normal disc cloning software for the two reasons listed above.

QUOTE(raulpica @ Sep 8 2011, 07:57 PM) I advise Macrium Reflect. Works like a charm, and it's freeware.

You can do it anyway. Clone the partitions individually with Reflect, and give them a new size while re-importing them.

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storag...fmt/WDAlign.png
Try doing 2 first. If it isn't aligned, align it.

After that, clone the drive, and check back. If it needs re-aligning, do it

Ran that, I can't find how to do what I want.

I do NOT want to make a separate image file to restore from later. I need to copy the partitions without storing them elsewhere first, it just wants me to save an image to modify.




EDIT: I feel stupid, I can just copy the first partition over with some software, then have the samsung utility fix it's alignment (it is at sector 63 on this drive since I re-used the same partition from my old XP install), then have Windows expand the partition as needed, then I can copy the second partition over and expand that.

Now to find something that lets me copy a partition from within windows without having to waste space making a second copy...



EDIT2: Tried Partition Magic and while it did seem to copy the partitions just fine (rebooted and ran on startup to copy the main one, didn't need to do that to copy the second), the main/Windows partition was not bootable. Upon trying to boot from that drive I'd just get the blinking cursor forever... and when I tried to do a Window repair install it said the drive had no valid system partition and attempted to fix, but that didn't fix it... in fact it shows in the startup repair section as being 0MB big, and now when I boot into Windows it's showing up as normal and having the D drive letter in disk management, but doesn't show up in My Computer... whereas the copy of my second partition (which was not modified while I was testing things) is working just fine.

Does anybody know of a free partition cloning program (cloning, NOT backup-then-restore) that will copy a Windows system partition and have the copy on the new drive be functional? I wanna' just copy the main partition, then expand it, then copy over the second and expand it.



EDIT452: From doing a second check it seems my current drive is using primary partitions whereas the default setting in Partition Wizard for the copies was logical... going to try copying the partitions over with the setting changed and see if the new ones are bootable.



EDIT2,210.21: Set the partitions to be primary this time and re-copied... and I still get the endless blinking underscore cursor upon trying to boot from that drive... however the windows startup repair does detect the partition with the correct size after one repair, but the repairs don't change anything beyond that (and it doesn't even try to fix anything after the first).

 

[Zetta_x]

I'm so glad when I got a few of these drives in the other day, I didn't need to clone them. Seems like a pain.

Did it also recommend, by chance, to make sure you have a windows update and a Rapid Storage Technology by intel?

 

[Mazor]

Completely regardless of what exactly it is you want to do, you can do it with dd when it relates to drives.

There's really no point whatsoever for any of the 2000 random softwares that get recommended in threads like these if you're computer proficient enough to be able to follow the instructions required to boot Linux and pass parameters to dd as specified in said instructions.

For the problem you're having not being able to boot, the first thing I would do given that the drive does indeed contain all necessary operating system files is open the drive in fdisk and make sure the correct partition is set to boot. Then I would try running fixmbr and similar bullshit that never actually work.

 

[Rydian]

Completely regardless of what exactly it is you want to do, you can do it with dd when it relates to drives.I want the first partition bigger, but the second partition is in the way, so a direct copy is a no-go otherwise I'd have just done that if I didn't need the first partition modified.

QUOTE(Mazor @ Sep 9 2011, 12:02 PM) For the problem you're having not being able to boot, the first thing I would do given that the drive does indeed contain all necessary operating system files is open the drive in fdisk and make sure the correct partition is set to boot. Then I would try running fixmbr and similar bullshit that never actually work.

Yeah I was thinking last night before I went to bed that I need to be able to mark it as bootable and that maybe the windows repair tools didn't try the bootloader fixes, but the commands for Vista/7 changed and I didn't remember them offhand, going to try them now.



EDIT: Success, though I needed to go to the Windows boot menu and choose the last known good configuration to avoid a BSOD... and Windows de-activated, but that's to be expected and no issue.

So to summarize what worked in my case...

1 - Using Partition Magic to copy the partitions "with resize", making sure they're primary, not logical as is the default (not so sure on if this is required anymore).

2 - Booting off a Windows 7 disc, going to the command prompt, and using "diskpart" to mark the Windows partition as active.
http://ss64.com/nt/diskpart.html
(Something like "list disk" then "select disk 1" then "list partition" then "select partition 1" then "active".)

3 - Still in the command-line, using this info to rebuild the bootloader.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-t...oader-problems/
Though I needed to add the "force" tag to the end of the bootsect command, and I ran "bootrec /rebuildbcd" just to be sure. XD

3 - Booting windows in the "last known good" configuration.

4 - Letting Windows re-activate.

So yeah, I just kinda' shotgunned fixes at it so I'm not sure which steps were the ones that actually did it, but since I only have a Windows 7 single-boot setup I didn't mind wiping the bootloader a few times to be sure.

 

[Nimbus]

If I remember Rydian, an Advanced Format Drive typically uses 4,096-byte sectors, and it's usually advised to follow that as close as possible, unless you want disk speed problems and whatnot, I don't think it's really that such problems were noticeable myself, but either way I followed that when I formatted my new 750GB HDD that's been sitting in my Macbook (Hate it btw), and as of current times my Acer Aspire 7551-7422 (Love it btw).

I used GParted. The new versions have support for automatically aligning the sectors to fit in 4096 Byte increments. I also personally used Clonezilla (Love it btw) to clone any NTFS Partition, as well as my Ubuntu install.


I use rsync to backup my home partition, but that's another story.

Basically an Advanced format is a generic term pertaining to any sector format used to store data on the magnetic disks in hard disk drives that exceeds 512 to 520 bytes per sector.

Wiki Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

I usually keep 2-3 extra internal 2.5" SATA drives in enclosures for use as backup. One of them I actually use nowadays for temporary cloning storage, or in other words, I create the partition as needed, size and all, and clone it over to that if I need to rearrange partitions. Perhaps the best advice I can give you is

Make sure you have a working backup, or two working backups if you can.

 

[Rydian]

Ah damn, if I had known gparted supported 4K sectors properly I could have just burned a CD of it and used that, save myself some trouble... I knew about 4K stuff, but had seen that even though Linux was supposedly "immune", most of their tools had never been updated for it, that's why I was looking around for a modern Windows tool.

After I made sure the install was functional like normal I used the tool the harddrive suggested (from acronis+samsung) to re-align the partitions... took a while, but went off without a hitch.

 

[Costello]

I've used Norton Ghost at work.

It can create a full image of your original disk, conserving the state of partitions, the MBR and everything.
When cloning it to another hard drive it restores the original one 1:1.

Pretty awesome

 

[Rydian]

The issue is you can't expand a partition into the space of another, so if I did a direct clone I wouldn't be able to make partition 1 bigger because partition 2 would literally be blocking it's way.

 

[marcus134]

with software like partition magic or paragon partition manager, you can always move and/or re-size the second partition in a way that would allow you to expand the first one.

Also, when cloning with acronis, if you don't select the mbr, you can manually specify the size of each partition.

 

[Rydian]

Is partition moving with NTFS viable now? Last I read it was still experimental.

 

[marcus134]

because of some problems I experienced with partition magic, I switched to paragon partition manager several years ago and as a bonus I gained full ntfs compatibility.

Partition magic was "good" in early 2000 but it's completely outdated. It was bought by symantec and they discontinued it 7 years ago. It doesn't even support half of the features windows vista and 7 introduced in file systems and hdd support. srlsy the basic partition program that come with windows can do stuff that it can't do.

Also there is a thing I learned a long time ago, If a software has the Symantec brand on it, just stay away from it.

 

[Rydian]

Haha, my bad.

It's "Partition Wizard" I've been using. XD