need a copy / clone disk utility for disks with different sector sizes

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glengels

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I'm trying to copy from a 2 TB Seagate HD to a 4 TB WD HD. I've tried several different programs that supposedly copy/clone from one disk or partition to another, including Seagate disk wizard, Ease US Partition Manager, DriveImage XML, and a couple of others. I have yet to find one that looks like it will do the copy.

Seagate disk wizard didn't even let me select the WD as a destination disk. Ease US Partition Manager tells me that the source and destination have different sector sizes so the one cannot be copied to the other. DriveImageXML didn't show the right capacity for the destination (showing 500 GB instead of 4 TB), so I was afraid to proceed further in case it was selecting the wrong disk (since I have a HD that really is 500 GB, and I didn't want to overwrite it by mistake). I could go on, but like I said I have yet to find a utility that looks like it will do the copy.

In theory, the source HD is only half the size as the destination so I should be able to copy from one to another. Is there a utility that will do this copy? Do I need to return the WD drive and buy another Seagate, so that hopefully it will have the same sector size as the source drive?
 
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Phillip Corcoran

Phillip Corcoran

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Instead of cloning, you need to create a "disk image", but you'll need to have a third hard drive on which to save the image file, or a second partition on the donor drive that's large enough for the image file. Then restore that image to the target drive. That will overcome the sector size problem.
 
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popatim

popatim

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if this is a boot drive that you are cloning from please be advised that you cannot boot from a 4tb drive unless you have an efi or uefi motherbd and windows was installed in efi/uefi mode.

if this isn''t a boot drive then why not just partition the drive and copy everything over?
Acronis should be able to do this though, it supposedly only reverts to a sector clone if it cant read/understand the file system i think.
 
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Paperdoc

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As you found out, Seagate's free Disk Wizard will make a clone TO a Seagate HDD only - it does not worry about the Source. But you have a WD as your Destination unit.

VERY similarly, WD has their free cloning tool, Acronis True Image WD Edition that you can download, and it WILL clone to a WD Destination unit. However, I do NOT know for sure whether it can handle moving from a 2TB unit with MBR Partitioning to a 4TB unit with GPT Partitioning. Maybe WD's Tech Support people can answer that for you. I'm guessing the answer is yes, but that is only my guess.

Popatim has raised a VERY important point. Unless you have UEFI support on your mobo, don't do this with a boot drive.

 
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glengels

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I'm still not having any success at this.

I downloaded Acronis True Image WD edition from the WD website, but it doesn't let me clone to the WD drive either - the drive is grayed-out when I get to the step of selecting a destination disk, and the program doesn't give any explanation about why.

BTW, the disk I'm trying to clone is not a bootable disk.

I created a disk image using a program called Active @ Disk Image Lite. It took over 24 hours to create the image so I'm just now replying to the thread about the original suggestion posted by Philip Corcoran. I figured that since I want to clone from a 2 TB drive to a 4 TB drive, I could use 2 TB for the image creation and the other 2 TB for the restore. So I partitioned the 4 TB drive into 2 partitions, F: and G:. I used G: to store the disk image from the source drive. However, when I tried to restore from the image, the F: drive partition is grayed out - I cannot select it. I know that restoring from a disk image wipes out the rest of the content, but I thought that if I had 2 disk partitions, it would only wipe out the content on the partition I was restoring to. But other than having the 2 partitions on the same physical drive, I cannot think of any other reason why it won't let me restore onto this partition.

I tried to use a different disk image program to restore from the same disk image, but the other program didn't even recognize the first image I created. I'm supposing that these programs create proprietary images so one has to use the same program to do the backup as the restore. So I guess I can try a different program to do the backup, to see if it allows me to restore onto the partition as I explained above, but that probably means another 24+ hours to do the backup before I will know if this works or not.
 
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glengels

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One other thing - about just copying everything over using a windows drag-and-drop, there are a couple of disadvantages here. One is that from what I have seen in the past ,even though a manual copy preserves the timestamps of the files, it doesn't preserve timestamps of folders. Keeping the folder timestamps is important to me for a couple reasons. A disk clone would insure that everything is preserved.

Also, I have tried a manual copy a couple years ago when much smaller drives were involved like 400GB or so. I found that it took MUCH longer to copy this way than when I found a program that could just copy the whole drive (which was easy at the time). Also, occasionally in the past I have tried to manually copy folders with very many files, but if the copy process ever gets interrupted for whatever reason, it can become very hard to either start over and keep answering No about replacing files, etc, or else to figure out where the copy left off (it doesn't seem to always copy files in alphabetical or whatever order).

I'm starting to get to the point where I may resort to manually copying the files, but it is not my first choice. But I didn't think it would be this hard to do the disk clone (or image backup / restore).
 
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glengels

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Partition Wizard's Copy Disk utility says that since the source and target disk have different sector sizes, Minitool Partition Wizard cannot continue. Same thing I've gotten with other copy disk utilities.
 
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glengels

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I found a shareware program called Total Commander (free for 30 days, which is more than enough time to copy the disk) - it's like Robocopy but with a nice GUI, and an option can be set to preserve folder timestamps. It took on the order of a couple days to copy the whole drive, but at least I could let it run in the background instead of spending more manual time installing and trying other programs. That seems to have been my best option.
 
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