[SOLVED] How can I clone two HDD onto one HDD?

[stonefisher]

Hi,
I have two old hard drives that have been powered for around five years so presumably probably over 10 years old by now. They total 1.5TB so I was thinking of buying a 3 or 4 TB replacement drive and cloning the two drives onto the new one.

Can I clone all the partitions onto the new drive while maintaining drive letters and so on so that I can just swap the drives and everything still works and how can I do this please?

thanks for reading.

EDIT: And if anyone can recommend a cheap and reliable non shingled HDD in the UK that would be much appreciated.

 

[rgd1101]

what is on the old hdd?

 

[USAFRet]

Please show us a screencap of your current Disk Management window.
This can almost certainly be done, but maybe not the way you're thinking.

 

[stonefisher]

https://photos.app.goo.gl/K1APmHq9sSdqHqpf6

Here is a pic of disk management.

 

[USAFRet]

What I would suggest is:

Clone ONLY the contents of Disk 2.
This will leave empty space to the right.
Verify the whole boot thing works properly.
Then, create a partition or two, of desired size.
COPY the contents of Disk 1 and or Disk 0, into that newly created partition.
Change the drive letter so that it matches what the old drive used to be.

The OS will never know the difference.

 

[stonefisher]

Ah so its just a case of cloning one drive and then making more partitions and juggling drive letters. I plan to replace disk 0 and disk 1, disk 2 is my SSD.

I might as well not bother with cloning then since i will be resizing the partitions anyway.

I was wanting to avoid links and stuff inside programs and stuff misbehaving and stuff. I am not sure it would know to switch to the new drive if i just juggle drive letters.

I am using windows 10.

What if I launch linux from a cd and copied the files to the new drive from there, Can I set the windows drive letter in linux?

 

[USAFRet]

For the C, you do need to clone.
For the other secondary drives, no cloning needed.


In this instance, the resulting C partition will not be the whole drive space. Leaving unused for creating partitions to hold the data from Disk 1 and 0.

But you DO need to clone the OS drive.

 

[USAFRet]

-----------------------------
Specific steps for a successful clone operation:
-----------------------------
Verify the actual used space on the current drive is significantly below the size of the new SSD
Download and install Macrium Reflect (or Samsung Data Migration, if a Samsung SSD)
If you are cloning from a SATA drive to PCIe/NVMe, install the relevant driver for this new NVMe/PCIe drive.
Power off
Disconnect ALL drives except the current C and the new SSD
Power up
Run the Macrium Reflect (or Samsung Data Migration)
Select ALL the partitions on the existing C drive

(here, you ignore this part, because you WANT that free space on the drive.)
If you are going from a smaller drive to a larger, by default, the target partition size will be the same as the Source. You probably don't want that
You can manipulate the size of the partitions on the target (larger)drive
Click on "Cloned Partition Properties", and you can specifiy the resulting partition size, to even include the whole thing

Click the 'Clone' button
Wait until it is done
When it finishes, power off
Disconnect ALL drives except for the new SSD
This is to allow the system to try to boot from ONLY the SSD
Swap the SATA cables around so that the new drive is connected to the same SATA port as the old drive
Power up, and verify the BIOS boot order
If good, continue the power up

It should boot from the new drive, just like the old drive.
Maybe reboot a time or two, just to make sure.

If it works, and it should, all is good.

Later, reconnect the old drive and wipe all partitions on it.
This will probably require the commandline diskpart function, and the clean command.

Ask questions if anything is unclear.
-----------------------------

 

[lordmogul]

EDIT: And if anyone can recommend a cheap and reliable non shingled HDD in the UK that would be much appreciated.

For a non SMR drive I'm quite happy with Toshiba drives. At least here in Germany all of their 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB 7200 RPM drives sold seem to be CMR. But I'm not fixed on any manufacturer, they just happen to be about 2€ less than a Seagate SMR drive

 

[stonefisher]

@USAFRet
Hi, thanks for the help but I am sorry, I seem to have caused some confusion.
I have two mechanical HDD's and one SSD which is the boot drive and holds games with bad load times.
I wish to replace the two HDD's (Disk 0 and Disk 1 on image posted above) with a newer larger one and keep my old SSD (Disk 2 from image posted above). They are all Sata drives.

My main goal for asking was to find if there was a program that would copy the files over to the new drives and and switch over the links and drive letters for me.

In the past when I have swapped out HDD's I have had issue with links endding up pointing to the wrong drive whish is no longer in the computer instead of the new drive. It gave me lots of headaches chasing them down inside program settings and lots of reinstalling because some programs didnt have an option to fix the link/directory paths.

So I am now thinking of booting linux, partitioning the new drive and copying the data over.

But that would still leave the drive letters to be assigned. which i do in windows as it will just think the old HDD are not connected.

Would this work?

@lordmogul
Hi yes, I was looking at the Toshiba P300 3TB drive which is commonly available here.
The P300 range has CMR drives from 500GB to 3TB and SMR from 2TB to 6TB.
Of course they never say on the website whether it is SMR or CMR and is even reluctant to give specifics on the manufacturers website.

But thanks to your msg prompting me to look at the website again I have spotted that the 3TB SMR drives have a 128MB buffer and a 5400RPM rotational speed while the CMR drives have a 64MB buffer and a 7200RPM rotational speed.

And here I thought the bigger the buffer the better but it seems not.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Just copy all the partitions one-by-one to a larger drive. Then change drive letters.
Drives larger than 2TB have to be partitioned in GPT, to be able to access all the capacity. On GPT drive you can have up to 128 partitions.

 

[USAFRet]

So the OS is on Disk 2, SSD, and it will stay there? I thought you were moving that as well.
No problem.

On the NEW drive, create five partitions.
Copy the data from Disk 1 to 3 partitions as appropriate.
Copy the data from Disk 0 to the other two partitions.

Manipulate the drive letters so they match what the old drives used to be.

 

[stonefisher]

Ok thanks, I shall just give it a go the easy way first in windows.

I can always try again if something goes wrong afterall.