cloning hard drive trouble, how to proceed.

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draexo

draexo

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Jun 6, 2013
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Here is the situation:

1TB seagate hard drive running Windows 7. It was cloned about a year ago from a 300GB drive using Clonezilla. The drive only reported 300GB total space until I executed some commands so it showed the entire drive. In Windows, it shows a 200mb GPT partition and the balance as a MBR 920 (or so) MB partition. The Windows MBR is drive C:

Purchased a 2TB seagate hard drive. Seagate tools will not clone it as it contains mixed boot records - GPT and MBR. I tried Clonezilla again, which will not clone the drive due to the mixed boot records. Clonezilla sees 3 partitions on the drive, SDA1, SDA2, SDA3. SDA1 is the 200 MG GPT partition. SDA 2 is what appears to be a 300 GB MBR partition and SDA 3, which appears to be the balance of the drive.

Clonezilla wants me to run sgdisk -z to "zap" the GPT partition. I am concerned about what will happen to the drive. Does it even need the GPT partition? There is an MBR on C:.

This leaves me with either running the sgdisk -z command or using a program that claims it can convert GPT to MBR with no data loss,

Suggestions on how to get this 1 TB cloned onto the 2 TB?

 
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Jaxem

Jaxem

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Jul 22, 2013
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I used to use Clonezilla for this sort of thing, and there is a way to get it to ignore that sort of thing and just do a bit-for-bit clone, but spending $20 on Acronis True Image was one of the best things i've done and what i'd recommend. One click clone of everything with zero problems in the at least dozen scenarios i've used it.
 
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draexo

draexo

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Jun 6, 2013
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Acronis does not work. It says it will convert the entire drive to GPT and warns about it not being bootable in BIOS anymore, only UEFI, which I am fine with. Then it reboots, goes into the Acronis "OS" if you will.... then fails and reboots into Windows.
 
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draexo

draexo

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Jun 6, 2013
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I am trying Easeus now. It shows an even stranger partitioning of 200mb, 921GB and 650 GB. Not possible since the drive is physically only a 1 TB. Will see how this one goes!
 
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draexo

draexo

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Jun 6, 2013
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Easeus cloned the drive and it boots and everything *seems* ok. Until you look at free space, it is still the size of the original drive (921gb). Then when you go into the paritioning menu, the drive pops up as 1.82TB - unallocated - which is not possible as it is physically the only drive in the system and I just booted from it. I used Easeus Partition Master bootable USB and it shows the same - 1.82 TB unallocated. Again, it is not. How do I fix this?

Also, no matter what boot order I select, if I leave the original drive plugged in, it is always the boot drive. Maybe this is something to do with the UEFI Bios??? Eventually I will need to make the original drive a secondary drive in the same machine. it almost sounds like I have to format it in another computer.

 
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F

fzabkar

Judicious
Sep 22, 2010
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Could we see the original partitions with DMDE (freeware disc editor)?

I suspect that you may be able to use Linux dd to clone the drive as-is, ie sector by sector. Then you could probably edit the clone to convert it to MBR mode. I may be able to help you do this with DMDE, depending on what we find in sector 0.
 
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