My problem is that I run both Linux (Debian Stable) and W7 (rarely) on that laptop, I’ve got multiple partitions (sda1 through sda8), and I’m using cloning software, so it seems to fit the use case requiring your formatting software. When I go to your download page and answer the questions, I get no software. When I click on information about other OSes, I get an error 403.
Can you suggest what I should do? If I have to do anything, I’d rather do it after partitioning and before moving all the data over to save time, but I’m not sure Clonezilla supports that.
Yes, as I tried to say and link to above, the software manufacturer said there is a problem, and WD writes there is a problem.
From their FAQ (second link) in response to the question, “Is Clonezilla compatible with ‘WD Advanced Format’ disk?”, they write
Clonezilla is not 100% compatible with “WD Advanced Format” (4096-byte) disk.
It works for the following cases:
“WD Advanced Format” disk to “WD Advanced Format” disk
“WD Advanced Format” disk to 512-byte disk disk But it won’t work for 512-byte disk to “WD Advanced Format” disk.
If you want to clone 512-byte disk to “WD Advanced Format” disk, after using Clonezilla to clone it, you have to use the tool “wd align” from WD to tune that on the destination disk, or manually tune the partition table on GNU/Linux.
Unfortunately, I can’t find the WD Advanced Format software on the WD site www.wdc.com/advformat, although I do find on that page that I apparently need to align my disk because of the cloning and presumably the multiple partitions. There’s a link to a page there that deals with non-Windows systems, but that page is now missing. I checked the Wayback machine, and it didn’t crawl it thanks to a robots.txt file.
Thanks, Steve. Now I’m confused: what you said sounds nice (fdisk sounds pretty easy to use), but I just spoke with someone in the WD support call center today who said WD no longer recommends aligning these disks unless they’re both big (3-4 TiB and up) and being cloned. With my small disk, he’d suggest just running Clonezilla to format, partition, and install the image and call it quits. If I wanted, I could always run the alignment later, he noted, but it might take some time.
Is this something you found on the Internet, or is this something you’ve done yourself? Have you experienced problems not aligning a disk? Either way, thanks; it didn’t turn up in my searching. I was about to run Clonezilla this evening, but now the possibility of wanting to run fdisk first gives me pause.
Just use clonezillas advanced copy instead of image clone. You can’t truly clone the old drive anyway because the new drive is larger. Follow the prompts in clonezilla and it will make an exact copy of the source disk data only to the new drive. Sector size is irrelevant. Even if you were actually doing a clone between similar sized drives… during the clone process, it copies sector by sector to the new drive which in turn makes the sectors be a clone of the source drive.
Cloning copies EVERYTHING inlcuding formatting and sector size
Advanced copy only copies the data from one drive to another.
