Migrate data drive to a WD Advanced Format drive (2TB).
I need to migrate data (not a system drive) from a 1TB NTFS drive, originally formatted using XP, now connected to a W7 Pro (32-bit) system, to a 2TB drive that uses the new WD Advanced Format. Normally I would clone the drives using ATI 2011 but, despite trawling this thread, I am still unclear if this will be correctly aligned. Can someone confirm if ATI 2011 will handle this correctly and if not what the preferred procedure is for this process.
I'm aware there is a "WD edition" that is supposed to handle this, but I can only imagine that will cause all kinds of problems with my existing ATI 2011 installation! Advice please!
Yeah, that will work. But it would be good to know for sure if ATI 2011 handles this correctly.
Jon - while TI should do what you want to do why not just copy the data from one drive to the other using something like "SyncBack Pro" or "Beyond Compare 3". This is what I use and over the past month I've copied about 8TB of data from various drives to different drive arrangements.
Thanks. Some good ideas for tools to do this outside of ATI, but if Acronis could confirm if 2011 fully supports cloning to advanced format drives it would be much appreciated.
Mark: would that method work well for system partitions? In other words, if i create a 4 partitions drive under Win 7 - say first 100meg active A1, second and third X1 X2 logical NTFS, fourth unassigned to be used later for a Secure Zone. And if later on I never change this arrangement, could I use that drive on an XP system as if it were a non-AFD drive???
Tekawa:
I'm not really up on all of the ramifications of using the 4kB sector size Advanced Format Drives, but from a quick read of a few articles, you should be OK.
The current crop of AFDs present 512-byte sectors to the outside world while using 4 kB sectors internally. So they are supposed to work with both older (XP) and newer (Vista/Windows 7) operating systems. They will be slower if XP is used to partition and format the drive with partitions starting at sector 63, but they will still work. But if you use Windows 7 to partition the drive (or use the WD Align utility) then they will run at full speed on both W7 and XP. So I think that what you propose doing will work OK.
I would recommend a change to your partitioning plan, however. If you only need 4 or fewer partitions then make them all primary. Primary partitions are easier to recover if something should go wrong someday. All of the information about the location of primary partitions is in the partition table. Information about the location of logical partitions is scattered across the disk. This isn't an issue if nothing ever happens to your disk, but bad things can and do happen with hard disks.
Mark:
>>> excellent suggestion on primary partitions ! thanks a lot. I had started on this new scheme after deciding NOT to play anymore with dual boot partitions - too much of a nightmare when things go wrong and a partition needs to be re-imaged.... So using logical partitions was a good reminder, but I was not aware of the ramifications. Now will definitely change to all primary for sure.
On this topic: are there any caveats/ precautions if I "just" convert from logical to active my existing drives logical partitions ? (there are allways 4 max including the SZ on any drive)
>>> " should be OK" . .ha ha .. would love to be an alpha tester .. .except not enough time, and can't risk doing it w/o thorough pre-testing. I wish someone would do a white paper on best practices in that subject.
>>> slower w/ XP etc. - actually what put a real damper on my enthusiasm for AFD drives is the following experiment - comments appreciated.
take a new (Samsung) 2TB drive, format and partition on an XP SP3 machine with Acronis DD10 (latest version 2288), two extended 1 TB (about) logical partitions. All fine apparently. BUT when I mount that data drive on another (Vista business) PC, I get unrecoverable errors, the secnd partition disappears. When I then try on that Vista PC to format the second logical partition again I get the error: failed to write to the sector -387,943,232 of teh hard disk 2. Which means Acronis DD doesnt handle AFD well at all. And I can't partition either from the Vista OS utility.
Which means an AFD drive *cannot* be used on regular XP PC's at all without some footwork (needs align, but the Samsung align software wouldn't recognize that SAmsung drive #!$@ )
Tekawa:
DD 10 should be alright for converting partitions from logical to primary - I've never had a problem doing this.
DD 10 has always had issues when formatting partitions intended for Vista or Windows 7. I'm not sure of the exact reason, but it is best to avoid this. DD 10 usually does OK if you CREATE the partitions with DD but format them with Vista. However, partitions created by DD 10 will have offsets of 63-sectors, which are not aligned for use with an AFD drive.
If you want the best results from your disk then your best bet would be to create partitions and format the drive with Vista only. Use Vista's diskpart command to clean the disk and then to create the partitions. Or, you could upgrade to DD 11, which will create partitions with the same alignment as Vista if done from a PC running Vista, or if done from the boot CD. Then, avoid using Windows XP Disk Management or DD 10 to modify the partitions on the AFD.