I have a 320 billion byte disk partitioned as:
X: 78 GB Y: 199 GB Z: 10 GB

 

I want to clone this onto a 750 billion byte disk, increasing two of the partitions.
X: 78 GB Y: 500 GB Z: 20 GB

 

What's the best approach to doing this?

 

Should I use specific cloning software, or should I just manually partition and manually copy?

 

(I do have software relying on the drive letters staying the same, but I guess I can always re-assign in Windows afterwards.)

 

I'm thinking cloning will occur at a lower level than a regular copying, so will be faster. However, I don't know if it'll let me resize the partitions at the same time?

 

There's a note on the drive itself about some "Advanced Format" and WD Align software thing, which might give me more space or something... http://wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7 ...it seems to suggests that I only need to use that if I'm going to be using a cloning utility.

 

Somewhere on that page/site there is a link to "Acronis True Image WD Edition" which can do cloning whilst also supporting the Advanced Format thing. At 147MB it sounds pretty bloated, but the PDF manual does mention doing a data transfer and being able to re-allocate disk space between partitions manually, which is exactly what I want (there's also a proportional option, plus a no resize one).

 

So I guess I'll do it that way (not now; about 23ish), unless someone here can recommend a better way?

 

 

Give DriveImageXML a go.

 

Manually partition the new drive as you want it to be. DriveImageXML can definitely make an image of each of the partitions then you can restore said images. It seems it can do Drive to Drive too. So pick the source and destination partitions and off you go. Hopefully.

For such a small amount of data, I would do it in Windows using robocopy and get the partitions right first time instead of having to mess about cloning then moving and resizing.

The exception to this rule is if any of the partitions have your Windows installation on them, in which case you'll be wanting to use a clone tool to at the very least clone X: and the boot sector.

But ignore Western Digital, don't bother with the additional software or Acronis, just use a bootable USB / CD with clonezilla on it.

And since you're on about speed are you sure you mean MB rather than GB?

It actually wouldn't surprise me if Pete still had a partition that was 78MB.

Me either!

Good to see someone is awake. :P

There's no system drives or boot sectors involved.

There's about 215GB of data in over 250,000 files.

I use the windows backup utility for this. It only copies the files (and you can select the ones to/not copy), so that right there might save a huge amount of time over a block copy*. Dunno how it might work with an OS though (I keep my apps on their own partition, and have done this sort of thing several times, it's fairly bulletproof IME). Size of the target partition is irrelevant, so long as it's big enough.

 

*er -- but it's a 2-step, backup+"restore" [to the new disk] process. Bonus: you have a backup copy!

Wait a sec, you use Windows for something useful?

Depends on whether you consider computer games "useful"...

 

(actually, I do also use it for photoshop).

I was wondering why it was called DriveImageXML, so I went and found the website, hoping that there was some obscure acronym and they weren't just using a buzz word to appear cool.

But no, it's worse than that!


Anyone who thinks...
1) XML is suitable for storing hard drive images;
2) that this should be the defining feature of a product;
3) and an explanation of this is not required in the FAQ;
...is not someone that I want to trust with handling data. :/

Robocopy has a shitload of options.

Do I need to care what they all do, or does it have sensible defaults?

You seem to be suggesting that I take a 200GB partition, back it up to some non-existent space, instead of simply copying it to the device I bought because I've got insufficient space. :|

Have you even tried it?

It's a GUI front-end for built-in functionality, and it's been created by idiot(s).

It might work, but I'm not seeing any compelling reasons to use it over either RoboCopy or Acronis True Image?

The job could've been well on the way by now. It works, it's easy to use. Just use it.

Well, I dunno. Why not just format the new partition(s) and copy the files across in the usual way then. Why the need to clone, exactly?

For mirroring a volume, the basic syntax would be:

robocopy [source] [dest] /MIR

This will copy everything from [source] to [dest] while also deleting everything from [dest] that doesn't exist on [source].

If you omit the /MIR option it will copy files only and not delete anything from [dest].

If either the source or destination partitions are FAT32 or network shares (especially if they're Linux SAMBA shares) you will also need to add /FFT to the end of the command above otherwise every time you re-run robocopy it'll think the files on the source drive are newer and copy them again.

Other options that might be useful are /XD and /XF which ignore directories and files respectively. Depending on your user credentials, you might need these for ignoring the "System Volume Information" folder and "$Recycle.Bin".

So a full command might look like:

robocopy [source] [dest] /MIR /FFT /XD "System Volume Information" /XD "$RECYCLE.BIN"

All you really need to do is make sure you don't get [source] and [dest] the wrong way around :)

Thanks, though I went and read up on it anyway.

I went with /E to copy the directories as well, and not risk deleting from dest (even though it was empty anyway, I was paranoid about getting the source/dest the wrong way round).

That /XD would have been useful - fortunately I found something that said use /R:10 to limit the number of retries, otherwise it would have been stuck on the System Volume Information forever, instead of just five minutes. :(

( Why on earth did they implement "default 1 million" combined with a default retry wait time of 30 seconds!? That would have meant nearly a whole year trying? :? )

Anyhow, everything all swapped around now. :)

Fortunately the disk I wanted to change was in the [relatively] easy access compartment, instead of requiring me to take the whole case off like the other one apparently would require.

Now to re-organise various files I had shunted around back to their logical homes...