I’m planning on moving the Windows 7 64 Pro O/S from a venerable Fujitsu U320 SCSI HDD to a new 500GB Velociraptor (WD5000HHTZ). Normally I’d try sing Acronis to do this - will it work satisfactorily?
The new WD drive has 4K sectors - is this likely to cause any pitfalls?
I can see that I might have to follow the instructions in “How to use the Acronis Alignment Tool to realign an Advanced Format drive” from Answer ID 5341.
If anyone has any useful advice on this subject, I’d very much appreciate it.
If your running anything that changes the bootloader etc remove/undo that first before cloning.
There are millions of people around the world running “Windows Loader” by DAZ
If anyone reading this is gonna clone remove that loader before you do it… trust me lol
I did this recently and used Paragon Partition Manager and used the advanced method and made sure it was a sector by sector copy (rather than any variation of faster copies)
Sector by sector is the common method and you should be fine if you do that regardless if your using a large format drive or not… but i would advise checking the status with an alignment tool afterwards just to make sure its reporting proper alignment… once again i used the Paragon Alignment Tool which is NOT free like the Acronis version is from WD. I noticed the Acronis tool read my partition alignmenet wrong once and the Paragon one worked properly that’s whay I switched to that other one but i think most times the Acronis one will work ok so i dunno your choice. Same with cloning software… your choice. there is SO many options out there free and paid to clone your drive. If i wasn’t such a big fan of Paragon’s stuff i would probably use the Acronis free one from WD but i don’t know how well it works etc
