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Hard drive swap/clone question

Nebor

Nebor

Lifer
I have my OS on an SSD, and all my other stuff on a 2tb platter drive. I'm upgrading to a hitachi 3tb platter drive (because of the Steam summer sale) and I'm wondering if I'll be able to run some sort of clone program that boots before windows, allowing me to clone my current drive to the new one, so that windows never knows the difference other than the increased capacity. I ask because my usual c:\users is actually d:\users, and that whole thing is kind of a bitch to set up IIRC, and I don't want it to get messed up.
 
Is the OS not on the C drive anymore? I don't see how that could happen by simply adding another drive to an already existing OS.
 
The OS is on the C:\ drive, but I made the registry changes to shift all of my user folders to the platter drive, since so many games and other programs fill up your user folder with all sorts of stuff, and I only have 20gb free on the C:\ drive.
 
Nebor said:
I have my OS on an SSD, and all my other stuff on a 2tb platter drive. I'm upgrading to a hitachi 3tb platter drive (because of the Steam summer sale) and I'm wondering if I'll be able to run some sort of clone program that boots before windows, allowing me to clone my current drive to the new one, so that windows never knows the difference other than the increased capacity. I ask because my usual c:\users is actually d:\users, and that whole thing is kind of a bitch to set up IIRC, and I don't want it to get messed up.
Click to expand...

Typically you get a clone app to do that when you buy a retail version of a drive. Maxtor and all the usual suspects make a CD to do exactly that, or you can find someone from a Linux distro of your choice, or you can buy something from Symantec (Ghost vLatest, etc.).
 
Clonzezilla, free, should work fine if you buy a bare drive. Burn to a CD or make a bootable USB with Clonezilla.

Unless you've encrypted the drive, I think it should be fine.

Just ensure you use expert mode and the -k or -k1 option, I forget which, so that it appropriately resizes the partition tables. If you use beginner mode and device-device mode, then I think you'll end up with a 2GB partition on your 3 GB disk.
 
Nebor said:
...my usual C --> users is actually D -->users, and that whole thing is kind of a bitch to set up IIRC, and I don't want it to get messed up.
Click to expand...

This is a non-issue, and very easy to manage. I do it frequently.

When I recover an OS image, it's in plain text. I only encrypt it after updating the OS with changes I want permanent, and save a new image for the next time I revert. Since there is no encryption of the OS at that time, there is also no pre-boot authorization that would allow other partitions to mount automatically.

Since my User directory is on my D partition, which is encrypted, the OS is unable to read it before I mount that partition. Later, once the OS is encrypted again, D can be auto-mounted with the pre-boot authorization. Until then, there are a couple complaints that D does not exist, but it is not a problem. I simply ignore these messages, mount D, and everything everything works fine. I can't access my personal data, but drive letters can be changed, and other maintenance can be performed normally.

In any case, it is a simple matter to change drive letters through Disk Management, once you have copied all your data around. Until you do, the OS will still operate just fine. There is no need to clone per se, a simple copy will work fine, followed by a drive letter change.
 
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ecom said:
Clonzezilla, free, should work fine if you buy a bare drive. Burn to a CD or make a bootable USB with Clonezilla.

Unless you've encrypted the drive, I think it should be fine.

Just ensure you use expert mode and the -k or -k1 option, I forget which, so that it appropriately resizes the partition tables. If you use beginner mode and device-device mode, then I think you'll end up with a 2TB partition on your 3TB disk.
Click to expand...

+1, however you can extend the 2TB partition after you boot back into windows to 3TB. I would swap the sata ports of the two drives after cloning and boot back to windows once with only the 3TB drive connected. Make sure everything works then shutdown and reconnect the 2TB drive. If all is well then you can quick format the 2TB.
 
I just noticed this in the description on Amazon:
Hitachi Deskstar 3.5" 3TB internal hard drive does not support RAID configurations and cannot be used as boot drive.

Weird. I'm glad I wasn't planning on using it for either of those...
 
boochi said:
+1, however you can extend the 2TB partition after you boot back into windows to 3TB. I would swap the sata ports of the two drives after cloning and boot back to windows once with only the 3TB drive connected. Make sure everything works then shutdown and reconnect the 2TB drive. If all is well then you can quick format the 2TB.
Click to expand...

For Win7 that might work though I have not tried. I think I ran into some problems with XP trying to do that at work after cloning an 80 to 250GB. In that scenario it was necessary to do the -k or -k1 option. I didn't dig too much into that matter. At work, as long as it works is good enough; there isn't time to figure out why.

OP says C:\uers\ so he should be fine since that suggests he using Vista or 7.
 
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Total cluster fuck. I cloned the drive onto the new drive, but now windows says the User Profile service failed logon. I've tried rebooting with both drives, and each individually and I get the same message every time. Also, for some reason since adding the other drive, I can't F8 into safe mode. Windows just boots up normally and fails every time. I guess I'm going to have to reinstall windows, which makes me regret ever getting this new drive to start with. 🙁
 
So I reinstalled Windows on my SSD, and my old 1TB drive works, but the new 3tb drive doesn't show up in disk manager. It does show up in device manager though....
 
Nebor said:
I have my OS on an SSD,

all my other stuff on a 2tb platter drive.

I'm upgrading to a hitachi 3tb platter drive

I ask because my usual C;users is actually D;users
Click to expand...

What the F?

Is there something more that's relevant than the above items I copied from your OP? Why is this so complicated? According to your OP, all you are doing is adding a data drive, and you want to use for your Users data to replace your original data drive. The other items- though interesting- aren't relevant to your task.

As I pointed out earlier, there is no reason to clone. Simply copying the data from your 1TB drive to the 3TB drive. Then, changing drive letters around was all that was needed.

Now that you have cloned the 3TB drive, is it possible that it messed up the factory format that allows the 3TB drive to work? I don't know enough about formats to offer the best solution to recover from the format change caused by cloning. Perhaps now you need to format in GPT mode, so you can see the disk, then simply copy your data to it, and switch drive letters around.

Look at Mark R's response in the thread "Seagate 3TB external HDD". (sorry I can't link to it) I understand this isn't the same drive, but the solution may be similar.
 
It's too late for that now. I reinstalled windows so I'll have to set up my user file locations in the registry all over again. I'll probably end up having to reinstall a crap load of applications too.

Right now I'm waiting for ~1tb of data to transfer from one disk to another, after FINALLY figuring out the right formatting to allow Windows to assign a drive letter to the 3TB drive.

All in all a huge headache, I wish I hadn't even attempted this. Apparently I'm too dumb to add a hard drive.
 
Well apparently the very popular Clonezilla mentioned above does something funky to the hard drive when you clone to it, making it unrecognizable to Windows. So I'm back to square one. Awesome.
 
In retrospect I should have kept everything as it was and just moved Steam to the 3tb drive. Instead I've spent two days getting everything to that point.
 
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