Hard Disk Migration issues

[sle118]

Hello,

 

In the past, I performed several disk migrations from smaller drives to larger ones, and from regular drives to SSDs or hybrids.

 

This is my first time attempting to migrate to a Corsair drive, and the process has been nothing but frustration so far. I would really appreciate if someone could provide some assistance.

 

So far, I have connected the drive on a secondary SATA port, booted to Vista on the "old" 80Gb SSD and proceeded to create a partition on the new Force 3 120GB. First thing I noticed is that there is an EFI partition that cannot be removed or changed.

 

So I created a partition for the remaining available quantity of 111.59Gb and formatted it NTFS with the default allocation unit size (which I believe is 4Kb on this version of Vista).

 

I used Acronis to back up my existing system drive, created the bootable media and turned off the system. I replaced my main SSD with the new Force 3 drive (using the same SATA port) and booted to Acronis.

 

From there, I selected the backup to restore, and followed the wizard until Acronis no longer wanted to let me proceed. It is not capable of restoring an MBR backup on a GPT partition.

 

I have been researching for hours and cannot find clear explanations on :

1- Aligning partitions? Do I need to care about this?

2- Allocation Unit Size when formatting? Does this have an impact on the Force 3?

3- What is the EFI System partition, is it required and if not, how do I get rid of it in Windows?

4- Most importantly: how can I get Acronis to restore the backup on that Force 3 drive?

 

Why can't Corsair do like other hard disk companies like Seagate and provide a bundled software to assist with the migration?

 

Can anyone please help?

[madnisman]

Hi,

 

I have zero experience in disk cloning (nothing better than a clean sysprep installation :sunglasse), but I will try to help you:

 

1- Maybe this will help http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=100344

2- You should format with default allocation size, this would be 4096 bytes (4kB).

3- This seems to be required for the GPT partition.

4- You should delete GPT partition and create MBR partition. Booting from GPT partitions is only for EFI-Systems available.

[sle118]

I finally resolved the issue myself.

 

The main problem was that my Force 3 already had a GPT partition table, which prevented Acronis from restoring the backup since the source was from a MBR partition table.

 

The way to resolve this was:

1. Install Acronis TI demo
   
2. Backup source drive entirely
   
3. Shut down
   
4. Remove old drive
   
5. Plug in new Force 3 drive
   
6. Boot in Parted Magic
   
7. Start gparted
   
8. Create an MBR partition table (this actually erases the drive content)
   
9. Reboot in Acronis
   
10. Restore Backup
    
11. Reboot - Vista starts
    
12. Vista installs new drivers for drive and prompt for a reboot
    
13. Reboot
    
14. Enjoy the new drive
    

 

Hopefully, this post may help someone