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Disk cloning questions

S

silz

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 3, 2006
Messages
92
Hi everyone, a quick question here. If I am cloning my old disk drive to my new drive but remain using my old hard drive as the boot drive, would all the programs on my new drive works as it is? The drive letters will all remain the same. I heard cloning is much faster than backup and restore plus not needing any external HDD thats why I am doing this lol. Thanks in advance.
 
why would you clone an old drive to a new drive and still want to use the old drive as boot drive ?
 
Cause if I can do it then I will partition it as GPT instead of MBR which would allow me to better manage the partition size. I will be getting an SSD later with the ongoing price drops but my main concern now is storage.
 
I'm not sure I understand what you want to do, but "cloning" and "GPT instead of MBR" don't go together. When you clone you get the same kind of partitions you had before, and there is no way that I know of to convert from MBR to GPT.
 
Ok, I didn't know but thanks for the heads up. I could at least start backing up now while waiting for my 4TB Black to arrive. Thanks.
 
silz said:
Hi everyone, a quick question here. If I am cloning my old disk drive to my new drive but remain using my old hard drive as the boot drive, would all the programs on my new drive works as it is? The drive letters will all remain the same. I heard cloning is much faster than backup and restore plus not needing any external HDD thats why I am doing this lol. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

As per the above poster, I'm not clear on what you want to do. Two different drives and/or partitions can't have the same drive letter. So no, programs installed to the boot drive will not work if moved/cloned to a different drive if still using the boot drive. You'll have to uninstall the programs and reinstall them on the new drive (if they let you install somewhere other than "C:").

Also like the above poster says, cloning and MBR to GPT don't go together. On a drive formatted as MBR, you can clone it to a drive larger than 2 TB, but you won't be able to use the additional space. So to use all the space on a 4 TB drive, you'll have to create the new drive as GPT (with one or more partitions, your choice), backup the personal data of the programs on the current boot drive, uninstall them, then reinstall them on the new drive. Then import your personal data to the programs, if necessary.
 
i know cause i am quite confused myself as i'm doing it for the first time. i will just try to illustrate it as best i can.

my old drive have C, D, and E with the letter D being the games folder. If I am to clone it into the new drive the D and E will keep their drive letter, I will delete the cloned C partition and extend the D as I planned to use the old disk as my boot disk. So the old drive will keep the OS but the original games partition will be deleted and reformat for work related stuff.

so my question is would the games work if I do it just that?

or should i just back up the games partition, restore it on my new disk partition which would be significantly larger and deleting the old games partition to make way for other stuff?

thanks in advance.
 
I would just copy the games and assign the letter D to the new drive (and do away with partitions).
 
silz said:
i know cause i am quite confused myself as i'm doing it for the first time. i will just try to illustrate it as best i can.

my old drive have C, D, and E with the letter D being the games folder. If I am to clone it into the new drive the D and E will keep their drive letter, I will delete the cloned C partition and extend the D as I planned to use the old disk as my boot disk. So the old drive will keep the OS but the original games partition will be deleted and reformat for work related stuff.

so my question is would the games work if I do it just that?

or should i just back up the games partition, restore it on my new disk partition which would be significantly larger and deleting the old games partition to make way for other stuff?

thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

Ah there we go, now its more clear.

Well, you can in fact convert a MBR to a GPT disk using standard Windows tools. But like formatting, you will lose all your data. So its inapplicable in your case.

In terms of your setup, it makes it far easier to copy installed programs to a new drive. But you still cannot "clone" the existing partitions D & E to the new drive as the old partitions are still MBR ones. The entire drive unfortunately needs to be GPT (with however many partitions you want on it) to access more than 2TB of space on the drive (in my experience).

So copying the data is the best bet, as what Aesma above suggests: copy the games and assign the letter D to the new drive (and do away with partitions). Modern games (and most other programs) installed to other partitions usually have a fair bit of data still installed to C:, but will function fine if the drive letter of a copied installation is the same as the old one.

As to what to use for copying, several like Robocopy (only native to Windows 7 & 8). If running some other Windows version (or not), another free command line option is strarc (near the bottom of that page). For a good GUI option, FastCopy (free) is cool.
 
it may be a bit beyond what the original poster wants in terms of learning curve, but using dd and a simple linux livecd is another pretty easy command line option for cloning a drive.
 
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