Imaging and Different Hard drives

Hello everyone,

I have an old Acer Aspire One AOA 150. It came with a 160 GB Hard drive. I want to replace it with a new Toshiba 500GB Hard drive I got. This new hard drive is a modern Advance Format drive. Obviously the old one is regular format. I would like to clone them. My question is, will I see negative results because the hard drives are different ? Or do I have to install all programs from the beginning?

 

AFD disks are designed to be completely compatible with traditional disks, so in principle I think there shouldn´t be any problems with the cloning.

Alignment is important in AFD disks. You should use software that checks alignment during the cloning process, or check it after the cloning and correct it if necessary.

 

Like which software? I normally use Acronys or paragon for imaging tasks.

 

I would use Paragon. All recent versions support "automatic partition alignment".

 

Thanks for your help I'm going to try it.

 

Just wanted to update that I cloned the drives and it works fine but the sectors are 512 bytes. Note that I'm using Windows 7 on this netbook. I think I have to make this to advance format to avoid problems right ?

 

That´s normal. When you use an AFD disk, the software sees 512-byte sectors, for compatibility, although the physical sectors are 4096-byte (4k).

If you want to check that the disk is AFD, you can use the command
"fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:"
in Administrator mode.

 

Here's what I got:

NTFS Volume Serial Number : 0xfc66b59966b554dc
Version : 3.1
Number Sectors : 0x000000003a352fff
Total Clusters : 0x000000000746a5ff
Free Clusters : 0x00000000067aeb8a
Total Reserved : 0x0000000000000700
Bytes Per Sector : 512
Bytes Per Cluster : 4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
Mft Valid Data Length : 0x0000000007600000
Mft Start Lcn : 0x00000000000c0000
Mft2 Start Lcn : 0x0000000000000002
Mft Zone Start : 0x0000000000971700
Mft Zone End : 0x000000000097de80
RM Identifier: BE9468A3-3201-11E3-AF9E-002197855C03

 

You should also get this line, which I don´t see in your post:

Bytes per physical sector: 4096 [AFD disk]
or
Bytes per physical sector: 512 [traditional disk]

Also, bear in mind that AFD disks are not "real" 4k disks. In 4k disks, both logical and physical sectors are 4096-byte. I think (not sure at the moment) that these disks can only be used in UEFI systems and are only supported by Windows 8.

 

That's the only information it gives me. Maybe it's because this is windows home premium?

 

I don´t think that´s the reason. Did you install the new disk as the internal disk? Did you apply the command to a partition in this internal disk? If you apply it to an external USB disk, the size of physical sectors won´t appear.

 

Well to do this process I used a desktop pc. I think I know why it doesn't show more info. The thing is the motherboard this desktop have treats achi drives kinda like external ones. In Everest it shows the disk is scsi. You can't even get the smart data from this motherboard unless it's in IDE mode. Maybe that's the reason. I didn't do any special commands. I just cloned the drives with Paragon and then install the drive to the laptop and it worked. On the other hand if I run Everest on the laptop I can get the smart data fine.

 

That may be the reason. As a final step, you could check that C: is aligned.

[I think I had posted this before, but I don´t see the post ...]