Hard drive cloning woes

[Churnd]

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!

 

[dunkster]

The utilities offered by Western Digital for their drives have worked for me.

Use WDDIAG to check for bad/weak sectors.

Use Data Lifeguard install/setup/copy utility to clone old HD to new HD.

Last time I used Data Lifeguard to clone a multi-partition Maxtor 40Gb drive to an 80Gb WD Caviar. Their is an option to scale partition size(s) to match the larger HD size, and it did so flawlessly.

The partitions on the Maxtor HD had been set up with Partition Magic - no problem.

Hope this helps!

 

[Churnd]

I think I've fixed the problem. Apparently, HDClone made some kind of funky partition on the new drive that wasn't showing up in any of my partition utilities. I used WDDIAG's utility to write zeros to the drive, which (hopefully) solved the problem. Restoring the image as we speak. *Fingers Crossed*

 

[Churnd]

Something I just thought of. The original drive has Norton Systemworks installed on it (I know, I know). That package includes Go-Back. Would that mess with the partition utilities?

 

[Churnd]

Well, my hunch was right. Apparently, Go-Back encodes and encrypts the drive using a Type 44 format and I haven't been able to find a partitioning utility that'll work with that format. Nothing wrong with HDClone except for the fact that it's slow. But hey, it's free. Go-Back has it's own cloning utility that must be used. I haven't found any other utility that'll work with it yet. I hate Norton.