Migrating hard drive to a new physical drive. Help!
April 1, 2013 7:58 AM   Subscribe

I'm migrating my physical boot drive (Vista 64, 1TB) to a new one. I'm having issues getting the migration to go the way I want it. I don't know if what I want is possible. The new drive is 3TB. If I use DriveXML or the included Seagate utility

I'm migrating my physical boot drive (Vista 64, 1TB) to a new one. I'm having issues getting the migration to go the way I want it. I don't know if what I want is possible. The new drive is 3TB. If I use DriveXML or the included Seagate utility it only allows me to go up to 2.2TB in size because of the MBR limitations. I would like the drive to be GPT to use the full space in the correct partition configuration for my machine.

Is there an alternate way/software/whatever to have it clone over the drive and convert to GPT in situ?

Is it possible to do a file to file copy and than mark the new drive as bootable the way you could in XP? I don't want to have to reinstall everything and I have a specific config I need for work. Is there any hope?
posted by damiano99 to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
It looks like you might just have to do a file-by-file copy and then a repair install of Windows. This won't be pretty.
posted by dobi at 8:10 AM on April 1, 2013


I would try gparted with the latest version of Ubuntu, Click "Try Ubuntu" on booting ubuntu, and start gparted. With gparted you can copy partitions between disks (with resize), and it handles both MBR and GPT parition tables.

I'm not 100% sure if the end result would boot into Windows, if not I would boot from a Windows CD, then use the fixboot command, which might work.
posted by Baron Humbert von Gikkingen at 8:53 AM on April 1, 2013


Best answer: This sounded like a problem Clonezilla could solve, and sure enough after a bit of googling i was right.

1. Make two 1.5gb partitions on a GPT partition table on the new drive.

2. Clone the old drive to the first partition, then take your old drive offline and file it away so that you can't accidentally lose any data if something goes wrong.

3. Format the second partition, delete it, and expand the first partition with something like Gparted

This should take about two hours. I've done this to go from 160>500gb hard drives, and from smaller drives to 1tb. what i searched showed that apparently if you have partitioned the drive as GPT first clonezilla will just dump the data in and not mess with that, and you'll be able to expand to 3tb later.

As a side note that i didn't see anyone mention on any articles about this i googled, this will probably cause windows to fail to boot. just like when you switch from legacy SATA to AHCI. You'll need to pop in your windows DVD and run a repair. The automated "windows startup repair" it runs from within the windows bootup process will just choke. This is assuming the windows bootloader even gets that far after being shocked with a MBR>GPT swap. You'll probably need to count on just having to pop in the DVD and doing this.
posted by emptythought at 3:13 PM on April 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


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