What's the best way to clone my internal HDD to an external to replace it?

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Phazoner

Phazoner

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Jul 2, 2014
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I'm planning to change my internal HDD (1TB) to another one (4TB) which is nowadays an external 7200rpm drive. The box has no more 3.5 bays so I have to replace it, so my intention is to clone 1TB drive to 4TB via USB and then just replace it. It should be painless but I have no idea about cloning and I imagine there should be problems recognising the new free space or something.

How should I do this?
 
Solution
SkyNetRising
When initializing the drive, you specify partition format - MBR or GPT.
With MBR your drive will be limited to 2TB capacity. You have to choose GPT.
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SkyNetRising

SkyNetRising

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What exactly is "the box"? Does "the box" have any free sata ports?
You can put 3.5" drive into 5.25"drive bay (using adapter), if your "box" has any.

Just attach the new drive temporarily with sata cables, perform clone operation and then swap the drives leaving only the new one.

Oh yeah - one more problem. 4TB drive will need to be partitioned in GPT partition format. If it is secondary storage drive, then no problem. But if it is also OS drive, then your system has to be capable of UEFI boot to use GPT drive up to its full capacity.
 
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Phazoner

Phazoner

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4 SATAs, 2 2.5 bays, 1 3.5 bay, DVD-RW bay. It's a Mini-ITX build. Master drive is a SSD .M2 in the back of the mobo so I can just format HDD in NTFS and run, can't I?

How should I perform cloning? Any Windows utility? Some freeware?
 
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Phazoner

Phazoner

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Hm, how do I "make" it GPT?
 
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