How do I clone an MBR partitioned boot disk to GPT partitioned disk

DanielBlakemore · Jul 4, 2012

My current hard drive is dying, so claims Windows and Hitachi Drive Fitness Test. I bought a replacement drive 3TB drive which requires GPT partitioning.
I have 64 bit windows and a UEFI motherboard, so I know I can use the drive as a boot drive for a brand new installation.

My question is how do I move the entire contents of my old drive to this new drive and keep it bootable?

I asked on other another site and they suggested I first let the Windows installation disk partition the drive GPT correctly for Windows, then copy the contents of the old drive to the new one. However, another person on that site said that that would break all the symlinks (didn't know symlinks played such a crucial role in the OS) and that I should use a cloning utility that knows how to copy NTFS. Was this person off base, or is it impossible to create a bootable copy of a Windows installation by just copying all the files (this would be from live linux of some type, not Windows itself)? If it is impossible, is there a utility that can copy the contents of a partition correctly, without needing to clone the entire partition table?
Also, I have no room to make an image of my old drive anywhere.

Finally, does anyone know if clonezilla can copy an mbr partition to a gpt partition automatically, essentially doing exactly what I need, or will it always copy the partition scheme as well?

Thanks

DanielBlakemore · Jul 4, 2012

After more searching, I found another SevenForums thread which may answer my question. Obviously my pre-post research was not thorough enough.
Anyway, in this thread arkhi said:

arkhi said:
Winefly said:

Can data that was stored in a MBR partition be cloned, then copied onto a GPT drive? Is this even possible? Basically what I want to do is have my existing drive be converted and all data, including OS be restored. Possible, or not possible?

Click to expand...

This is the command I used in command prompt to backup my drive to move it to GPT:

Code:

robocopy [I]C:[/I] [I]D:[/I] /mir /zb /copyall /dcopy:t /sl /xd "System Volume Information" /xf hiberfil.sys pagefile.sys /xj /r:0 /w:0 /tee /log:robocopylog.txt

Replace C: (Source) and/or D: (Destination) with your appropriate drive letter or folder path. Note that /mir will MIRROR your harddrive with the path, so if there are files in the destination that is not from the source, it will delete it. Make sure you put an empty drive or folder as the destination.

Also, if you're copying a Windows Vista and up installation, your junctions won't be copied and you'll need to do a repair install once you boot up your new GPT drive.

My only issue is that I only have one motherboard with UEFI and it is still in a box since I planned to replace my motherboard and update drivers after I had cloned my installation to the 3TB drive.

Can I use robocopy like this while booted from the drive being copied? Otherwise, I have a computer running Windows 7 Ultimate x64, could I plug both of the drives into that and copy one to the other with robocopy, even though the motherboard does not have UEFI (will the 3TB drive even mount?)?

Also, is there a flag I can use to force robocopy to continue copying if it comes across bad sectors?

Thanks

n2gc · Jul 4, 2012

Can you GHOST it ?
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...sg=AFQjCNGiZ8U2dedVJQDkJg3pGGeRR_vDLg&cad=rja

solarmystic · Jul 4, 2012

DanielBlakemore said:
After more searching, I found another SevenForums thread which may answer my question. Obviously my pre-post research was not thorough enough.
Anyway, in this thread arkhi said:

-SNIP-

Hello and welcome to the forums DanielBlakemore,

I believe the 3TB drive can be mounted on any Windows 7 x64 system, even those without UEFI if it's not set as the boot drive. UEFI is only crucial for allowing GPT drives with partitions of > 2TiBi to act as boot devices.

The robocopy procedure you intend to perform can be done on a secondary machine without UEFI on its motherboard.

DanielBlakemore · Jul 4, 2012

n2gc said:
Can you GHOST it ?
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...sg=AFQjCNGiZ8U2dedVJQDkJg3pGGeRR_vDLg&cad=rja

I suppose I could, if I wanted to buy Norton Ghost on top of the new motherboard I already bought, and the new hard drive I already bought (getting kindof expensive here). But I was hoping that I would be able to do it with clonezilla, or using the robocopy command. Plus, to do that, I would have to boot and use my dying hard drive which I am (baselessly?) paranoid about doing lest I exacerbate the problems with the drive and corrupt more data.

solarmystic · Jul 4, 2012

Hello, DanielBlakemore.

Have you read my previous post?

DanielBlakemore · Jul 4, 2012

solarmystic said:
Hello and welcome to the forums DanielBlakemore,

I believe the 3TB drive can be mounted on any Windows 7 x64 system, even those without UEFI if it's not set as the boot drive. UEFI is only crucial for allowing GPT drives with partitions of > 2TiBi to act as boot devices.

The robocopy procedure you intend to perform can be done on a secondary machine without UEFI on its motherboard.

Well that is great to hear! I was beginning to think I'd gotten myself in a bit of a catch 22 needing the motherboard to use the new disk, but needing the new disk to be set up before I could install the motherboard drivers.

As for the additional part of my question, I'll look into the robocopy docs on Technet, but does anyone know offhand whether robocopy can continue if it finds bad sectors?

solarmystic said:
Hello, DanielBlakemore.

Have you read my previous post?

Yep, I saw it after my last response.

DanielBlakemore · Jul 4, 2012

So after looking at the Microsoft Technet page on robocopy, I think I will not be using /tee since I know from experience writing CLI tools that printf's or other console printing is really slow (which would slow robocopy if it were copying lots of little files). I also think I will be using /MT:2 since the computer I will be copying on has a dual-core processor.

Does anyone have any other recommendations or warnings about using robocopy like this?

DanielBlakemore · Jul 5, 2012

As I mentioned, I was also asking this question on another site. That was Superuser.com. One of the users there has given me an answer that seems good too, so I am linking it here so the internet of the future isn't pulling their hair out when they have this same problem and the thread just ends. I'll also report back with the results of my attempts.

The question was:
Clone a Windows Installation to a 3TB Hard Drive; MBR to GPT - Super User

FliGi7 · Jul 5, 2012

DanielBlakemore said:
solarmystic said:

As for the additional part of my question, I'll look into the robocopy docs on Technet, but does anyone know offhand whether robocopy can continue if it finds bad sectors?

Yep, I saw it after my last response.

Click to expand...

Yes, it can with the /R:n option. I personally set it to something rather low, like 2 or 3 (default is one million tries). It would look like "/R:3". The sample robocopy line above has it as "/r:0" for no retries if it fails the first time.

DanielBlakemore · Jul 8, 2012

Good news and bad news.

Good news: I did a direct partition to partition clone of my Windows installation and all the files seem to be there (according to the Parted Magic file browser).

Bad news: Windows won't boot. I've tried a startup repair, I've tried to upgrade install to repair Windows, but that can only be done if Windows boots which seems dumb to me like needing to go online to activate your internet connection.

So, for my next trick, I will be running CHKDSK /R on the disk using another computer running Windows 7 x64.

Details on what I did to clone the drive:
I used clonezilla from Parted Magic
I chose disk-to-disk
I chose expert mode
I selected the -rescue flag
I let it run (for 43 hours of stress)
And that brings us to the present.

OH, I also cloned the 100MB system reserved partition. It is in the same place as it was on the old drive: at the beginning.

F5ing · Jul 8, 2012

Try using a Windows install DVD to use the bootrec command:

How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows

And if you don't have the DVD:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/

Hope that disk-to-disk clone really got everything. I've cloned drives that were in pretty bad shape, but only had to use the -rescue flag one time on someone's HD (sectors dying by the hour). The clone booted, but he did lose some data. Would've been better if he recovered all the data at the expense of the OS.

DanielBlakemore · Jul 8, 2012

F5ing said:
Try using a Windows install DVD to use the bootrec command:

How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows

And if you don't have the DVD:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/

Hope that disk-to-disk clone really got everything. I've cloned drives that were in pretty bad shape, but only had to use the -rescue flag one time on someone's HD (sectors dying by the hour). The clone booted, but he did lose some data. Would've been better if he recovered all the data at the expense of the OS.

I'm hoping I got everything too, but I know there were a bunch of read errors (from bad sectors).

I ran bootrec, but it seems to think that there are 0 Windows installations. It instantly finishes every operation (making me think that it isn't doing anything).

Oh, also, I ran startup repair and now the "System Reserved" partition has one directory "EFI" with two inside it: "Boot" and "Microsoft". "Boot" just has a file named bootx64.efi. "Microsoft" has another directory called "Boot", which contains bootmgfw.efi, bootmgr.efi, BCD and a bunch of directories with language specific .mui files for the two efi files.

I'm not sure how to proceed from here. Windows doesn't even try to boot, and bootrec can't see Windows. I'm just hoping someone here is smarter than I am.

Edit: If nobody has any suggestions in a few hours, I'm just going to do a fresh installation and hope I can recover most of the data from the old drive after the fact (sadly the cloning probably spread the bad sectors even further).

F5ing · Jul 8, 2012

Hold off on that reinstall if you can afford a little more time. Hate to see relying on that old failing disk as your only copy of your data.

One option to consider first: As you've done a disk-to-disk clone from a 2TB to a 3TB you should still have 1TB unallocated. You can create a partition there and and copy your data to that partition before considering a reinstall. Or if you've got other media available copy to there (which I guess you would've taken that route already).

I'm wondering if there are settings available in the BIOS that can be changed so that those boot files you found can be utilized. It may be that your BIOS is looking to hand off control to some other boot files that don't currently exist. I just don't know enough about UEFI yet.

I'll see if I can call some attention to this thread for some extra help...

DanielBlakemore · Jul 8, 2012

F5ing said:
Hold off on that reinstall if you can afford a little more time. Hate to see relying on that old failing disk as your only copy of your data.

One option to consider first: As you've done a disk-to-disk clone from a 2TB to a 3TB you should still have 1TB unallocated. You can create a partition there and and copy your data to that partition before considering a reinstall. Or if you've got other media available copy to there (which I guess you would've taken that route already).

I'm wondering if there are settings available in the BIOS that can be changed so that those boot files you found can be utilized. It may be that your BIOS is looking to hand off control to some other boot files that don't currently exist. I just don't know enough about UEFI yet.

I'll see if I can call some attention to this thread for some extra help...

I appreciate the help. I think I would have been nuts if I had to try all this stuff in a vacuum. However, I already reinstalled and I am copying the last of my games now. I lost one folder of wallpapers, and various small git repositories (which are still on the server I have). So far, everything else has been copied. Now to reinstall ALL the things I had before. Luckily I can use the old Program Files folder as reference.

I really should have done this to begin with and saved myself several days of stress. I would recommend that all future people install fresh and copy. It's faster and the BIOS to UEFI transition, to me, is not worth the trouble.

Oh, in clonezilla there is an option to extend the partition when the copy is done. I did that, so I had no space to put files.

Again, I appreciate all the help this forum has been and I am just glad all of my data is out of the woods.

Edit: Can I mark the thread as closed without marking it solved since there never was a solution to the problem I first asked about?

F5ing · Jul 9, 2012

Glad to see you're in the clear with little loss of data. Sorry though that we couldn't "solve" it.

As far as flagging the thread, my understanding is that it's either "solved" or not, at least as far at the typical user's options are concerned. But then again, I'm pretty new here, and I just haven't noticed any other options.

How do I clone an MBR partitioned boot disk to GPT partitioned disk

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