I was installing a new hard drive for a customer last night, and didn't have my Acronis disk on me. So I searched for a freeware utility that would do it, and came across this:
HDClone
It looked decent, and seemed that it would fit my needs perfectly since I was going from a smaller drive to a bigger one. So I made the floppy, booted to it, and it did it's thing.
First off, I noticed that it copied each individual sector from the old drive to the new one. Not sure if that had anything to do with the results... but read further to see what happened.
It took an hour to copy 8 gigs of data. I just figured it ran slow to improve accuracy. An hour later, the program finished it's work, I hooked the new drive up, and booted up. Sure enough, it booted straight to Windows. First thing I noticed was that Windows had to install the new drive. No prob there... that always happens. However, it gave an error while installing the drive, saying something about the drive filter not being correct. The next thing I noticed, it had literally cloned the old partition onto the new one, meaning the total size of formatted space on the new drive was the equivalent 8 gigs of the old one.
By the way, the drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE 40G. I've tried wiping the drive out, reformatting using the utility from WD's website, using PowerQuest to image old one but when I tried to restore the new one, PQ wouldn't even see it. Tried Acronis with no luck there either.
Could it be bad sectors on the new drive? Could it be that the new drive is bad? Possibly that the old drive was converted to a dynamic disk for some reason or the other? I'm confused!
HDClone
It looked decent, and seemed that it would fit my needs perfectly since I was going from a smaller drive to a bigger one. So I made the floppy, booted to it, and it did it's thing.
First off, I noticed that it copied each individual sector from the old drive to the new one. Not sure if that had anything to do with the results... but read further to see what happened.
It took an hour to copy 8 gigs of data. I just figured it ran slow to improve accuracy. An hour later, the program finished it's work, I hooked the new drive up, and booted up. Sure enough, it booted straight to Windows. First thing I noticed was that Windows had to install the new drive. No prob there... that always happens. However, it gave an error while installing the drive, saying something about the drive filter not being correct. The next thing I noticed, it had literally cloned the old partition onto the new one, meaning the total size of formatted space on the new drive was the equivalent 8 gigs of the old one.
By the way, the drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE 40G. I've tried wiping the drive out, reformatting using the utility from WD's website, using PowerQuest to image old one but when I tried to restore the new one, PQ wouldn't even see it. Tried Acronis with no luck there either.
Could it be bad sectors on the new drive? Could it be that the new drive is bad? Possibly that the old drive was converted to a dynamic disk for some reason or the other? I'm confused!