Drive cloning

[SC Tom]

See my follow-up (post above I hit send before ready) but to summarize,
how it shows up in device manager and/or disk manager will be dependent on
the drivers for the host adapter. What you see within Windows is
virtualized by the host adapter and not representative of physical ports
as you've just verified above.

To my original post, as what you just wrote above, each drive is on a
different port so the OP can just unplug the unused drives. The boot
drive, again as I said earlier, is usually the one on the lowest numbered
port. In your case, "probably" SATA1.

You're probably right about the ports being virtualized. That's kinda what I
thought way back when I set this thing up.

You would think the boot drive would be SATA1, but unfortunately, in my
case, it's SATA4. My old PCIe video card was so long that the end of it (and
the auxiliary power plug) prevented anything being plugged into 1 and 3, so
I had my hard drives plugged into 2 and 4. Since I had two EIDE optical
drives at that time, it was no big deal. Then the one optical died, and my
video card was on it's last legs, so I got a new PCIe video card and a SATA
Lightscribe-capable DVD and just left the hard drives where they were (since
they worked fine there). As long as my boot drive is first in the BIOS boot
order list, it has been no problem.

That's what I told him, too, just unplug the unused ones until he was done.
We were coinciding our replies, it seems- they were only a couple of minutes
apart.

I saw your other post about the premature posting before you were done. I
assumed what you meant when you mentioned both drives on one port

 

[Lewis]

Consider reinstalling everything onto the new drive.
I know it seems like a pain in the ass, but at some point it has to be
done anyway. Everyone knows that after a while Windows slows down and a
reformat is the best thing to do.

Well, the Windows 7 install is quite new and I've installed very little
on it (Firefox, iTunes+QuickTime, VLC, GOm Player, Skype, SABnzbd+, and
WinRAR and the drivers for the DLink Skype->POTS bridge) and don't plan
on installing anything else on it. The machine is used to download some
video and to send it to the projector and that is all.

I have some customizations to sabnzb that i do not want to have to redo,
so cloning is the way to go for me.

 

[Lewis]

In message <[email protected]>

Three different cables to three different ports. They're labeled on the MB
as SATA1 through 4, and are detected in BIOS the same, 1 through 4.
I should mention this is an XP SP3 box, but I wouldn't think that 7 would
see it any differently (and BIOS certainly wouldn't). My Win7 notebook sees
the SATA drive as just Location 0, but there is only the one hard drive in
it.

I hate to admit it, but I didn't look in Device Manager, I was looking
in the Disk Management think.

Deice Manager says the boot drive is "Disk 2" and is location 0 target
0. Other drives are Location 0 target 1 and location 1, target {0,1}
Not sure why it's "Disk 2" but I will see if SATA0 is the boot drive
when I pull them tomorrow.

 

[Gordon]

Good question. I don't know of any way within Windows to tell the SATA port
number that is used per drive.

As there can only be one SATA drive per port, the port number of the drive
is dependent upon which port number on the MB it is plugged into.

 

[Lewis]

Deice Manager says the boot drive is "Disk 2" and is location 0 target
0. Other drives are Location 0 target 1 and location 1, target {0,1}
Not sure why it's "Disk 2" but I will see if SATA0 is the boot drive
when I pull them tomorrow.

For the record, these data points had nothing to do with how the drives
were connected on the motherboard. The boot drive was in SATA3.

 

[Lewis]

For the record, these data points had nothing to do with how the drives
were connected on the motherboard. The boot drive was in SATA3.

OK, this was a not-fun experience. First off, Reflect did not have a
Clone function that I could find. It had an image function, which wrote
the drive out to some sort of image file on another drive, but no clone
function anywhere I could find. I did not want to image and then restore
because, frankly, that seemed very silly.

So I ended up using the Seagate tool which worked fine, albeit slowly.

Then I got to discover the fun that is SATA on a wintel motherboard.
There are 4 SATA ports on the motherboard, but they are not created
equal. Only two of the ports (the red ones) can be used for a boot
drive, and amazingly, the BIOS still labels them as Master and Slave.

It was like 1993 all over again.

I moved cables around and finally have everything up and running, but it
took the better part of 5 hours (most of that was copying the 300GB from
the old 500 to the new 2TB).

 

[SC Tom]

As there can only be one SATA drive per port, the port number of the drive
is dependent upon which port number on the MB it is plugged into.

But where in Windows can you find that? That was my point- I know how to
look at the MB and see where they are (having done that on more than a few
), but I have yet to find anywhere within Windows I can find out that
configuration information. HWInfo32 doesn't show it, and neither does SIW,
Disk Management, nor Device Manager.

 

[Lewis]

In message <[email protected]>

But where in Windows can you find that? That was my point- I know how to
look at the MB and see where they are (having done that on more than a few
), but I have yet to find anywhere within Windows I can find out that
configuration information. HWInfo32 doesn't show it, and neither does SIW,
Disk Management, nor Device Manager.

It looks like Device manager does show it. It will list ... crap, don't
have it in from of me, but for SATA1 it will show 0 and 0, for SATA2 0
and 1, for SATA3 1 and 0 and for SATA4 1 and 1. It has some words around
it, but after looking at the ports again and the info in device manager
I *think* it matched up.

 

[SC Tom]

In message <[email protected]>



It looks like Device manager does show it. It will list ... crap, don't
have it in from of me, but for SATA1 it will show 0 and 0, for SATA2 0
and 1, for SATA3 1 and 0 and for SATA4 1 and 1. It has some words around
it, but after looking at the ports again and the info in device manager
I *think* it matched up.

If you'll look at one of my other replies to Seth, you'll see that mine
doesn't. All three locations for my three SATA drives are "Location 0 (0)."
Whether that's because of the Nvidia chipset or not, I don't know, but mine
shows absolutely no differentiation between the ports.

 

[Rob]

In message<[email protected]>


OK, after looking at the other thread on this
(<[email protected]>) I think I am going to try
Reflect and see how that goes.

However, this does bring up one other question. When I had PATA drives I
knew how to tell which drive was the boot drive simply by how it was
connected to the PATA cable, but now with SATA I really have no idea.
The machine has 2x500GB drives and 1x1.5TB, so I only have two to choose
from. Is there anyway to tell which 500 is the boot? I didn't see
anything where Windows told me with SATA connection was used for which
drive, but I could have easily missed it not knowing where to look.

Worst case I guess wrong and have to redo it, I guess.

Recommend you use True Image (even the free version, DiscWizard,
which may come with the drive.)
You'll have no trouble identifying which drive to clone as it will
show you all of the various partitions etc - just choose the drive
with the Windows partition on it. Simples.

 

[LSMFT]

I picked up one of those $80 2TB drives at Microcenter today and am
planning on replacing the old 500GB in the W7 machine with it.

What I would like to do is clone the current drive ont the new drive so
I don't have to reinstall anything.

I don't know if the Seagate green drives come with software (haven't
opened the drive yet) but thought I would ask here for recommendations
on what software to use to do this, and what procedure I might want to
follow.

I will probably wait until Wednesday to do this as I have a several hour
block of time available then.

I always use Clonezilla boot CD. It's free and fully functional.

 

[wasted]

"Lewis" wrote in message
I picked up one of those $80 2TB drives at Microcenter today and am
planning on replacing the old 500GB in the W7 machine with it.

What I would like to do is clone the current drive ont the new drive so
I don't have to reinstall anything.

I don't know if the Seagate green drives come with software (haven't
opened the drive yet) but thought I would ask here for recommendations
on what software to use to do this, and what procedure I might want to
follow.

I will probably wait until Wednesday to do this as I have a several hour
block of time available then.

--
oh no! there's been unauthorized access to my paypal account!!! ... how
nice of someone at a grade school in korea to notice and inform me of it


I use Casper (now on vs 6) - I have 2 internal hard disks and regularly
clone C: to D: - and if disaster strikes, as it did recently with C:
failing, all you do is swap D: into pole position, and it boots up as if it
were the drive just removed. No CD needed to boot from.

If you clone a smaller disc onto a bigger one, Casper asks you what you want
to do with the extra space - and will share it between partitions if you
select that option - no need for separate partition management.

JP

 

[Roy Smith]

in message
I picked up one of those $80 2TB drives at Microcenter today and am
planning on replacing the old 500GB in the W7 machine with it.

What I would like to do is clone the current drive ont the new drive so
I don't have to reinstall anything.

I don't know if the Seagate green drives come with software (haven't
opened the drive yet) but thought I would ask here for recommendations
on what software to use to do this, and what procedure I might want to
follow.

I will probably wait until Wednesday to do this as I have a several hour
block of time available then.

Just use Seagate's DiscWizard which is available for download at:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

The program is basically a free version of Acronis True Image that will
only work if one of your hard drives is from Seagate. It will allow you
to format, setup partitions and transfer your data from one drive to the
other.


--

Roy Smith
Windows 7 Professional
Thunderbird 3.1.7
Friday, February 04, 2011 6:35:33 AM

 

[KernelDebugger]

If speed is a consideration you'd better check the RPM of the drive,
cheap[er] drives have a spindle speed of 5,400.

Another thing to realize is that larger drives are generally faster
than smaller one. Because the larger drives are physically the same
size as the smaller ones, the tracks are closer to each other, and
therefore the heads have to travel a shorter distance to go from track
to track.

The larger drives seem to have a higher failure rate than our hard
drives of a year or so ago. Check out the user reviews at Newegg.com
for any of the drives, WD, Seagate, they all are having problems.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...7603 600003269&IsNodeId=1&name=1TB and higher

I've experienced a 50% failure rate with the WD 1 TB HDDs; fortunately
Western Digital pays shipping both ways and replaces the drive very
expeditiously. With redundant backups, swapping drives is not a problem.