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Cloning HD

carlmart

Gawd
Joined
Sep 17, 2006
Messages
691
I need to clone a 400Gb Hd onto a 1Tb HD.

As I had a problem with that when I did the first time, I would like to know how to make it right.

Both drives are Seagate, so I use their DiscWizard program, which uses Acronis as their cloning tool.

Problem is when I tried it first it reformatted the 1Tb HDD onto 400Gb.

Maybe that was my fault, as when I partitioned and formatted the HDD, I choose the Quick Formatting option. Now the drive is partitioned (one) and reformatted with slow format, so I wonder if that may happen again.

In any case, any advice is welcome.
 
Problem is when I tried it first it reformatted the 1Tb HDD onto 400Gb.

After that you needed to expand the partition.

Maybe that was my fault, as when I partitioned and formatted the HDD, I choose the Quick Formatting option.

That has nothing to do with that. The cloning process would have overwritten any previous format and partition table.


Now the drive is partitioned (one) and reformatted with slow format, so I wonder if that may happen again.

Yes it will happen again..
 
There is an option to expand the partition on the destination in the options when you are cloning.
You will end up with a clone with a 1tb partition, which is what It sounds like you want.
 
Yes, of course, I want a partition with the whole size of the HDD

So how do I expand the partition?
 
I can't remember the steps, but as you run the program, there should be a choice to keep the partition size the same as the source or to use the rest of the space on the drive.
I don't have time to run the program myself right now, have to shower and head to a clients office and look at a PC that failed.

I'll check this thread when I get back home and see if you were able to perform the task, otherwise I will do it and screen shot the settings for you.
 
I wanted to enclose an image, but this forum seems not to allow it.

The options I have on DiscWizard are:

1) As is: The data on your old hard disc will be moved to the new drive in its current stage. The size of the partitions will not be changed.

2) Proportional: The size of the original partitions will be respectively changed to fit the new drive size. If the new drive is smaller, the partitions will be shrunk accordingly. If the new drive is bigger, the partitions will be enlarged proportionately.

3) Manual: allows setting partition size manually.

If I remember well, I used the first option and ended up with my 1Tb HDD re-sized to 400Gb. There was no free space after cloning. To me it seemed that would happen on option 2.
 
At this point it should not matter what option you selected. You should be able to resize the partitions after the fact. Windows disk manager allows you to do some limited resizing. If that does not work there are free tools like gparted and other windows based utilities that will do this for you.
 
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I have not selected anything yet.

I don't want to mess with Windows disk manager afterwards to resize. I would like to have the 240Gb data cloned into the 1Tb disc, leaving the rest free. One partition only.
 
Then you can start at the beginning with the manual option.

I don't want to mess with Windows disk manager afterwards to resize.

That is pretty easy to do and will be much faster than clonning the drive for the 3rd or 4th time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utUvkgKAtKU

Edit: Or did you only clone it 1 time getting an unexpected result then formatted and asked for advice.

Edit2: Option 2 should work as well.
 
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Option 2 is what you use, manual is so that you can can specify how large or small to make the partition, like if you wanted to have 2 500gb partitions.
 
Option 2 is what you use, manual is so that you can can specify how large or small to make the partition, like if you wanted to have 2 500gb partitions.

I assume you can manually select the whole destination size.
 
I wanted to enclose an image, but this forum seems not to allow it.

The options I have on DiscWizard are:

3) Manual: allows setting partition size manually.

I always used 3. But then I usually had 2 partitions on the source disk and wanted only one of them bigger.

I expect that 2 would would as well.
 
Well, everything went smoothly.

Just had to go with the manager to assign a drive letter. I imagine that's lost in the cloning, right?
 
Please do forgive my ignorance, but is it normal the HDD losing its letter when cloning?
 
If you have the old drive still active in the system, probably.
I usually clone system drives and remove the old one.
 
Just had to go with the manager to assign a drive letter. I imagine that's lost in the cloning, right?
The Acronis that WD gives you is a stripped-down version.

The real Acronis has many options including keeping the drive's credentials.
 
If you have the old drive still active in the system, probably.
I usually clone system drives and remove the old one.

I was cloning a XP drive using Windows 7 as OS. I had previously assigned a letter to the new HD, also in W7, which did not conflict with what already was there.

Maybe that's an Acronis bug though.
 
It's not a bug, you can't have 2 drives with the same letter on the one hand. On the other hand you're doing a clone, acronis doesn't care about what you have done with the new drive (which imho is a flaw, other softs like DriveImageXML don't work that way), it removes everything and attempts to get you a perfect clone. But of course if the old drive is still there, the letter can't be the same, so windows will give it a new letter. Once your remove the old drive you can change it if you want. When you clone the system drive of the computer, acronis will tell you to remove the old drive before rebooting.
 
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