installation onto a new HDD moving stuff around

gregrocker said:

Sounds fine.

Whoa that was extremely quick!

but yeah i will be formatting the 3TB today so pretty much here is my plan

1. Plug in 3 TB and boot windows off SSD
2. Format 3TB in disk management as GPT
3. Copy all stuff from 2TB (which is games etc) to the 3TB
4. Change the lettering of the 2TB (which i think i might have to do AFTER re image because some programs are automatically open from the 2TB on windows boot and cant be shut down, not sure yet)
5. Turn off computer and unplug all drives except 2 TB
6. Put in WinPE disk to load todo restore
7. plug in device that has image of computer
8. Restore image onto 2 TB
9. Get all data i missed getting when hard drive was returned
10. Wipe it clean again to become a storage drive again

Should work fine right?

I don't know because I don't use Todo. But the drive letter is completely irrelevant. You want any settings offered to be Auto drive letter, MBR and Track0 copied, either C or System Reserved (if you have it) marked Active.

If Win7 doesn't start unplug all other drives, confirm Partition Marked Active
then run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

gregrocker said:

I don't know because I don't use Todo. But the drive letter is completely irrelevant. You want any settings offered to be Auto drive letter, MBR and Track0 copied, either C or System Reserved (if you have it) marked Active.

If Win7 doesn't start unplug all other drives, confirm Partition Marked Active
then run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

Well im pretty sure when i did the image it contained both the main drive and system reserve and i believe todo uses a winPE format, just confirming a few things with them but might have to wait a few hours to get a reply back from them

Trial and error is okay with images since you can delete the target drive and start over, just don't touch the source drive.

You can check the available settings yourself to see if any of those are present.

In the app we recommend Macrium Imaging this is all automated based on the image it detects.

gregrocker said:

Trial and error is okay with images since you can delete the target drive and start over, just don't touch the source drive.

You can check the available settings yourself to see if any of those are present.

In the app we recommend Macrium Imaging this is all automated based on the image it detects.

I have 2-3 copies of the image 1 on the 2TB and 2 on separate externals as a precaution. The hard drive the image was based on has already been returned so i cant use macrium imaging unless your just telling me to use the restore feature from it?

Wait if an image was MBR can it be restored on a GBT or will the Hard drive revert to a MBR hard drive when the image is restored?

You must initiate the hard drive first in Disk Mgmt. If there is no OS then the Win7 installer or imaging app should initiate it GPT when installing or imaging a UEFI image, or MBR if not.

If you need to manually initiate the HD you can run Convert GPT to make it GPT or Convert MBR to make it MBR. I would run that command after running Diskpart Clean Command.

gregrocker said:

You must initiate the hard drive first in Disk Mgmt. If there is no OS then the Win7 installer or imaging app should initiate it GPT when installing or imaging a UEFI image, or MBR if not.

If you need to manually initiate the HD you can run Convert GPT to make it GPT or Convert MBR to make it MBR. I would run that command after running Diskpart Clean Command.

So should I just initiate GPT regardless then install the image using the winPE disk?

I'm not sure you can restore an image of an MBR partition to a GPT disc.

Greg??

As I understand it, you have an image of an MBR disc and intend to restore it to a new 3 TB boot drive. Correct?

If you insist on using a 3 TB drive as a boot drive made bootable by the restoration of an MBR image, I'd think you would not be able to use all of it--only 2.2 TB.

You can have MBR and GPT disks on the same system, but you can't have MBR and GPT partitions on the same disk.

Are you locked into the idea of a 3 TB boot drive?