Software to copy 2tb 5400 rpm drive to 2tb 7200 rpm drive under XP home SP3

[Daniel Prince]

I just bought a DVR that needs a SATA hard drive. Because my
computer is sometimes slow when it is dealing with large amounts of
data, I decided to replace my 5400 rpm drive with a 7200 rpm drive
and use the old drive in the DVR.

The new drive is a Hitachi. I think the model number is:
HDS723020BLA642. I have read that some new drives come with 4K
clusters which can cause problems with Windows XP. Is this Hitachi
one of those drives? If it is, what do I have to do to make it work
properly?

The old drive has two NTFS partitions on it.

It has a drive D: primary partition which is the boot drive. It has
my Windows XP Home installation on it. It is 117,19 GB (70% free).

It has a drive E: extended partition which is 1745.83 GB (86% free).

I also have a 111.79 GB C: drive which Windows has marked as
(System). This is a different physical drive. I will not be
removing or changing this drive.

I want to format the new drive exactly the same as the old one and
copy all the data from the old drive to the new one. What is the
best way to do this using free software? I have never used any kind
of Linux so I would prefer a Windows program.

 

[Rod Speed]

I just bought a DVR that needs a SATA hard drive. Because my
computer is sometimes slow when it is dealing with large amounts
of data, I decided to replace my 5400 rpm drive with a 7200 rpm
drive and use the old drive in the DVR.

The new drive is a Hitachi. I think the model number is: HDS723020BLA642.
I have read that some new drives come with 4K clusters which can cause
problems with Windows XP. Is this Hitachi one of those drives?
Yes

If it is, what do I have to do to make it work properly?

Hitachi claims that it cant be used with XP
http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/above-2tb/

The old drive has two NTFS partitions on it.

It has a drive D: primary partition which is the boot drive. It has
my Windows XP Home installation on it. It is 117,19 GB (70% free).

It has a drive E: extended partition which is 1745.83 GB (86% free).

I also have a 111.79 GB C: drive which Windows has marked as (System).
This is a different physical drive. I will not be removing or changing this drive.

I want to format the new drive exactly the same as the old one

What do you mean by that given that the old and new drive arent likely to be the same size ?

and copy all the data from the old drive to the new one.
What is the best way to do this using free software?

Most drive manufacturers provide a ute that will do that.

That operation is called cloning the drive.

I have never used any kind of Linux so I would prefer a Windows program.

Acronis True Image rescue disk does use Linux, but its very easy to use to clone a drive
since you dont use any part of Linux, you just tell True Image what sort of clone you want
to do, particularly on the question of what to do about the partition sizes when the old and
new drives arent identical sizes.

 

[Daniel Prince]

Hitachi claims that it cant be used with XP
http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/above-2tb/

That page says that it applies to drive of 2.2TB or greater. My new
drive is 2TB. The old drive is also 2TB.

What do you mean by that given that the old and new drive arent likely to be the same size ?

I mentioned in the subject line that both drives are 2tb but I
forgot to mention it in the body of the message.

 

[Franc Zabkar]

The new drive is a Hitachi. I think the model number is:
HDS723020BLA642. I have read that some new drives come with 4K
clusters which can cause problems with Windows XP.

Is this Hitachi one of those drives?

Most, if not all, current Advanced Format drives emulate 512-byte LBAs
which means they will be compatible with legacy OS-es. WD calls it
"512e".

According to the following document, the number of sectors for your
Hitachi drive is 3,907,029,168. This would suggest that each LBA is
still only 512 bytes.

Hard Disk Drive Specification Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (Models:
HDS723020BLA642 HDS723015BLA642):
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/tech...file/DS7K3000-2TB_andUnder_OEM_manual_1.0.pdf

Page 134 of the same document states that the value of word 106 of the
Identify Device information block is 4000h.

This means that ...

- Device does not have multiple logical sectors per physical sector
- Device logical sector is 256 words (= 512 bytes)
- There is 1 logical sector per physical sector

In short, your model is not an Advanced Format drive.

The old drive has two NTFS partitions on it.

It has a drive D: primary partition which is the boot drive. It has
my Windows XP Home installation on it. It is 117,19 GB (70% free).

It has a drive E: extended partition which is 1745.83 GB (86% free).

I want to format the new drive exactly the same as the old one and
copy all the data from the old drive to the new one. What is the
best way to do this using free software?

WD has an OEM version of Acronis True Image:
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

User Manual for Acronis True Image WD Edition:
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/AcronisTrueImageWDEditionUM.pdf

- Franc Zabkar