HDD question

I was thinking that if a single partition (not the whole volume) is cloned then perhaps the MBT on the target volume does not get updated or is updated but the entry is not in the same position as before (which perhaps Windows expects).

Also, Windows unofficially uses a couple of bytes deeper in the MBR to allocate drive letters which I imagine does not get copied and I wondered if booting the new system partition with additional volumes might fail if these were not lettered in a particular way.

Just guessing. :) I use a partition manager which avoid such possiblities so I don't know if they occur in other situations.

Macrium uses the Volume Shadow Copy service to clone the OS partition.

Most of the windows tools like Acronis are not brute force sector by sector copiers - they usually do a certain amount of reconstruction on the fly and "smart" copying so as to not copy what it expects to be unused sectors, and to dynamically resize on the fly.

Yup partitions built by Vista are later are usually OK. Alignment on ones created under XP can have problems though.

Shades of 640K should be enough for anyone ;-)

On my first HDD that would have been 5% of its capacity!

The smallest SSDs I buy these days are 240GB, so I can live with it.

I have not seen it mentioned as being an issue in the same way that AF misalignment is. It may be a reflection of the way that NTFS does not reuse freed space until forced to - so it can probably trim large blocks of pages together anyway.

I'm with TNP here. I cloned a laptop conventional hard disk onto an SSD using clonezilla and the result was that Windows required re-licensing.

I'm genuinely surprised you think differently. If only because Windows keeps a log of hardware, and where there's a material hardware change, say a motherboard or disk, it will ask for the licence number.

The smarter the disk gets the less it matters. As I have pointed out, possibly elsewhere, there is no 1:1 mapping of what sector you specify, to what physical sector is used on an SSD. There is a map connecting te two and a small operating system running iniside the disk to handle write requests by parcelling them out to whatever physical sector hasn't been written to as much, yet.

It's called 'wear levelling'.

Whether or not sector alignment matters is rather down to what particular algorithm is in play. And how big the 'raw sectors' or blocks are, on that partiucular SSD.

And this hoary old chestnut is out there on the internet with loads of false information, even from people who should know better.

My advice is ignore the issue. Its a bit like the really old days when we used to wroite 'C' with an underlying resp[ect for te archiercture we are on and the comp-ilers we were using.

Today, the compilers are so good,and understand the architecture they are to run on so well, that one doesnt have to bother, and, furthermore, the CPUS themselves are optimsied to run the C code.

SSDs will buffer write requests until they have a nice large chunk of data, and then try and do it all at once to a fresh less used sector.

Which may or may not respect virtual sector boundaries.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Nver underestimate the power of well crafted bullshit.

That depends on what you mean by clone of course. Brian

Yes as long as the cloning does not take place while windows is actually running and the booting info is copied and there are no jumpers to worry about it does work. The issue with some of the cloning software that stays inside windows is that windows locks some files when its running and they cannot be copied. Brian

VSS allows the cloning app to take a 'crash consistent' point in time snapshot of the drive, even when windows is running,

I frequently clone the running windows system partition. Windows has code in it specifically to allow it to do so. It has had it in for years.

Software like arcronis, uses it as well as the disk imaging software built into windows.

No it won't. One change like a HDD will not require relicensing. Changing to a new MB and a new HDD might. The effects are cumulative over some time period.

I have yet to need to get a license when cloning a windows disk to put back into the same machine. Even if you do it still boots and runs unlike what TNP says and you can relicense by clicking the activate button.

More bullshit from TNP.

What do people use to expand/contract partitions these days ?.

Partition magic was brilliant but only worked up to XP. I cannot install in Win7 Pro (But I haven't tried the XP emulator).

Especially if as you say it isn't a fresh installation.

Again, with a lower chance over time.

The more time goes by the less likely it would require re-authentication.

I think I might have had to in a tiny number (of very many) instances of complete system drive cloning.

Of all things I wouldn't take any notice of any Linux Fanboys is advise about Windows. They are by definition against it no matter what (in spite of being forced to rely on it for some 'Windows only' solution in many cases).

But the point that in most cases you can boot Windows into a Safe Mode

Cheers, T i m

I use Gparted (from a Linux LiveDVD / USB).

I also used PM to good effect but Gparted has replaced that pretty well 100% now (unless I'm using something like Acronis and do it there at the same time as cloning).

Cheers, T i m

All the PC's and laptops here are backed up daily (if they are on) to my WHS and that provides a 'bare iron' network recovery via a generic boot CD.

I've used it a few times now when HDD's have failed catastrophically and it works really well.

It does slow this old XP machine quite a bit while it does the backup but it's pretty slow in the first place (it's a very mature and well abused XP running on a Mac Mini).

Cheers, T i m

GParted live USB

Though I begin to worry that Win10 is "mucking" with NTFS to add weird and wonderful features, with no alteration of the NTFS version visible to 3rd party programs, so they may have a less than full understanding of the data they're messing with ... of course you'd only resize a partition you had backed-up, right?

Better yet, don't use Windows.

Full retail licences (not OEM) tend to be more lax. I have changed hard disks with no problem at all, in fact I've changed the whole damn machine.

You just can't do it too frequently (of the order of months, I believe).

I installed Windows, put in the licence number, and it registered and activated with no furthewr interaction.

That was a full retail Windows 7 Pro.