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Cloning existing install on 512B sector drive to 4K sector SSD

D

darkfoon

Member
Hello,

I just took the plunge and bought an SSD (Samsung 830 256GB, if you're interested).
My current machine has an old PATA 180GB system drive with a Win7 Pro X64/Mythbuntu dual boot.
I'd really rather not do a fresh install of windows on the new drive. I can lose the linux install since it's rarely used for watching live TV. But it would be nice to have.

Can I clone my drive (including both OSes) converting it to 4K sectors?

I first thought of booting a linux disc and just doing a `dd ibs=512 obs=4096 if=<patadrive> of=<SSD>` but my intuition says that would screw up everything.

The second idea I had was using the windows backup tool to create an image of my windows partition, then boot from the windows recovery disc and restore that image to the SSD. I would lose the linux partitions, but I could reinstall that later.

The SSD retail box includes Norton Ghost software for cloning, would that be the best way to go? I am wary of automated things with my non-standard configuration.

I am concerned about blindly copying 512B sectors to the SSD because 512B sectors will reduce performance and may shorten the lifespan of the SSD.
 
You are over thinking it.
All you do is create a 1MB partition at the start for the SSD, so it is aligned, and leave the rest empty. Then clone the HD to the empy area of the SSD.

FWIW, all SSDs are 4K sectors, and the firmware can do emulation of 512B for XP and so on...
 
I'm only concerned the 512B emulation will affect lifespan and performance. I don't care too much about compatibility.
If all I have to do is make a 1MB partition to aligns the 512B sectors with the 4K sector boundaries, then great.
 
darkfoon said:
I'm only concerned the 512B emulation will affect lifespan and performance. I don't care too much about compatibility.
If all I have to do is make a 1MB partition to aligns the 512B sectors with the 4K sector boundaries, then great.
Click to expand...
I think Acronis TruImage will do it... clone mode or partition image mode.
 
Physical, logical, and filesystem level.

Physical sectors might be 4k, but the drives pretend to have 512B (logical) sectors. If someone would access a single 512B (LBA) sector, the drive would still touch the whole 4k (physical) sector.

Someone generally doesn't. The default in common filesystems is to use 4k blocks. You can check yours.

Alignment is the issue. If those 4k filesystem blocks don't align with the 4k physical sectors, then there are issues. However, your HDD might already have "aligned" partitions. What is the output of:

fdisk -lu /dev/sda
 
>fdisk -lu /dev/sda
Code: 
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc1b91999

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848   293030893   146412023    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       293031934   312580095     9774081    5  Extended
/dev/sda5       293031936   308656127     7812096   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       308658176   312580095     1960960   82  Linux swap / Solaris
 
There we see each partition (Extended is not important) to start neatly on multiple of 1024MiB. Perfect.

While (disk-at-once) dd would faithfully reproduce every bit, it would unnecessarily write all the empty space too. The other (filesystem-aware) cloning apps are supposedly more clever about that.

Furthermore, you probably want to expand (some partitions) from 160GB to 256GB. The soul of Windows is beyond me, but the dd in me would:
1. Copy first 2048 LBA's.
2. Change partition table to new size.
3. Copy contents of each partition into new disk. There is no point in cloning the swap; just reinitialize (mkswap) it.
4. Expand filesystems that got more space.

But as said before, perhaps the clone apps can all that automagically?
 
Most manufacturers provide Acronis for free on their website, and this utility automatically aligns to 4K when cloning from 512 byte disks.
 
For this drive, unfortunately, the manufacturer only includes Norton Ghost. I say unfortunately because the general opinion of Norton Ghost seems to be pretty low.

I may use gParted or Clonezilla bootable CDs.
 
Hey, just curious, are you still using the system in rig? Does that board even support AHCI?

If you are still using that, might want to consider a new board/cpu/memory build, even a cheaper solution would be a huge upgrade to go with the SSD. Depending on how much you like to play games and at what resolution, the GPU may need to be upgraded as well 😀
 
Shmee, I am still using that system in my sig. I am upgrading it piece by piece. But maybe I'll just go ahead and upgrade the whole thing right now. 😀
 
darkfoon said:
I'm only concerned the 512B emulation will affect lifespan and performance. I don't care too much about compatibility.
If all I have to do is make a 1MB partition to aligns the 512B sectors with the 4K sector boundaries, then great.
Click to expand...

Why is everyone ignoring this and talking about alignment? Alignment is an issue but it is but one of his issues. This is a big and separate issue. Running a 512B allocation unit size on a 4096 Sector size drive is a problem.

This will lower your SSDs performance and lifespan. This will also lower your performance on modern HDDs as well since they are all Advanced format (4k sectors internally).

NTFS will ALLOW such small allocation unit sizes but defaults to 4096 unless you manually change it for some reason or another. Which back in the day people would do (using small sectors had its pluses and minuses, I used it myself at some point).

I think you should do a clean reinstall anyways, it will be good for you to get rid of junk and using windows 7 it will fix both of your alignment and allocation unit size issue. It will also disable defrag on your SSD (which will NOT be disabled if you do a clone) and maybe some other things we are forgetting.

Speaking of, using the test method in http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-...ned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance
I just confirmed that windows 7 correctly aligns SSD, but on a HDD it still aligns to the 63 bytes which means on a drive with 4k sectors reporting 512b sectors (which is all of them, currently all advanced format drives fake out the OS for backwards compatibility instead of admitting they have 4k sectors) it will align it incorrectly unless it has some alternative method of detecting such drives (which AFAIK does not exist)
 
Last edited:
I can't think of a way to check within windows without booting linux, but I believe my NTFS was formatted with the default 4096 allocation block size. I did not specify any non-default value for it.
The partitions, except for the extended one containing linux, are all 4k-aligned as well. Even the windows one.
I was planning on finding out how to turn off the defragging on the SSD after cloning.

As loathe as I am to do it, I may do the clean install. I want to be safe, and being lazy is not worth this new drive dying before its time. I have yet to kill a drive outright. (but I have caught a few in death throes and saved the data in time) *knock on wood*
 
darkfoon said:
As loathe as I am to do it, I may do the clean install. I want to be safe, and being lazy is not worth this new drive dying before its time. I have yet to kill a drive outright. (but I have caught a few in death throes and saved the data in time) *knock on wood*
Click to expand...

You had near misses where you recovered your data from a dying drive and you still haven't started using backups?
 
darkfoon said:
Hello,

I just took the plunge and bought an SSD (Samsung 830 256GB, if you're interested).
My current machine has an old PATA 180GB system drive with a Win7 Pro X64/Mythbuntu dual boot.
I'd really rather not do a fresh install of windows on the new drive. I can lose the linux install since it's rarely used for watching live TV. But it would be nice to have.

Can I clone my drive (including both OSes) converting it to 4K sectors?

I first thought of booting a linux disc and just doing a `dd ibs=512 obs=4096 if=<patadrive> of=<SSD>` but my intuition says that would screw up everything.

The second idea I had was using the windows backup tool to create an image of my windows partition, then boot from the windows recovery disc and restore that image to the SSD. I would lose the linux partitions, but I could reinstall that later.

The SSD retail box includes Norton Ghost software for cloning, would that be the best way to go? I am wary of automated things with my non-standard configuration.

I am concerned about blindly copying 512B sectors to the SSD because 512B sectors will reduce performance and may shorten the lifespan of the SSD.
Click to expand...


Im in the same boat on this one. My C currently is 512k I take windows image ,, its going to put them as 512k on the SSD ???? thx
 
Taltamir,

At the time in the past I was subsisting on donated hardware from generous friends. I couldn't afford backup hardware. I developed a "backup" system where I left old versions of the data on multiple drives.

Now, during the course of building this system, I bought a backup drive.
 
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