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3TB new harddisk - clone a bootable mbr partition to a gpt partition

1K views 12 replies 4 participants last post by  pingguo 
#1 ·
Okay I have to say that I am pretty new to this gpt thing so please bear with me.

I have the free Minitool Partition Wizard Free 9.1 and the Disk Manager of a Windows 7 Home.

I want to upgrade my 1TB Seagate Barracuda. I bought a new 3TB Seagate Barracuda.

As my disk 0, my old disk partition - MBR:
System reserved: 100MB system. active, primary <- Do not know what it is, probably the system restore partition built by windows
c: drive: 931GB, boot, pagefile, crashdump, primary

Try 1 - I did a disk clone with Partition Wizard from disk 0 to the new disk. I then swap the harddisks. Everything looks good, except that the windows boot is twice slower than before. I did a Seagate Tools short disk self test on the 3TB new disk and it failed. Then I removed all partition on it, convert it to gpt and go the same short DST again. This time it passed. The disk was fast too. The hardware seemed intact. It must be a setting problem, probably something to do with accessing a >2TB LBA disk.

Try 2 - I convert the new disk to gpt found that there is a 128MB partition. I deleted it. Do a partition clone on each of the two partition. Once it is done I double check it on my disk manager: the boot, system, status are all gone. I guess it does not work that way.

I am sure that there are a million people who did this before. What is the best way to clone the system to the GPT disk? I want to keep the desktop, settings, applications, everything. It is a 6 years old computer. Fresh installation and re-doing all the changes are impossible.

I saw people talking about MBR to GPT without data lost. Is that what I am going to do? Diskclone and then convert?

It would be nice if someone point a finger so that I know where to look. I want a clone-related or no-reconfigure-everything solution.

Thanks for checking out my questions and more thanks in advance for the help.

Edit 2016-2-4 #1: I tried a disk clone then converted it to gpt and it was unable to boot up. Any help would be appreciated.

Edit 2016-2-4 #2: Looks like the first partition has the boot folder. According to some instructions on the web I am going to change it to a 100MB EFI. Create a 128MB MSR partition following that then bsdboot my bigger partition. I wonder what I can do with the pagefile and crashdump status.
 
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#2 ·
Windows itself can only do this conversion if you delete all the partitions then do the conversion. You'll need third party software for this, luckily for you Partition Wizard 9.1 can do this conversion and keep the data and you already have it.

Here's what you need to do.
1. Open Partition Wizard 9.1
2. Locate the drive you want to convert.
3. Right click the HDD icon for the drive.
4. Select "Convert MBR Disk to GPT Disk.
5. Look in the "Operations Pending" panel to the left and double check to make sure you're converting the correct drive to GPT.
6. Select "Apply" in the top left and click on "Yes".
If done correctly, your entire drive should now be GPT, with all of the data intact.

You probably can't do this to the drive your OS is currently running from, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Here's how to make it work for you.
1. Backup any data you may have stored the 3TB drive.
2. Open Disk Management and find the drive # of the 3TB drive, then close disk management.
3. Open a command prompt
4. Type diskpart
5. Type list disk
6. Type select disk # - Use the nunber associated with your 3TB drive as seen in Disk Management.
7. Type clean
8. Open Disk Management and initialize your 3TB drive as MBR. Do not select GPT. You'll only be able to access 2TB of the space, but that's ok for now.
9. Clone your 1TB drive to the 3TB drive.
10. Once the drive is cloned, follow the steps above to convert it from MBR to GPT, and after that's done you can go ahead and expand the partition to 3TB from the Windows Disk Management.
11. Shut down, remove the 1TB drive, and reboot from the 3TB drive.
 
#6 ·
I looked around and it doesn't look like your motherboard has EFI support. This is required in order to use a GPT/3TB+ drive as a boot device.

You can use the drive as a secondary storage device with full capacity using GPT, but you can't boot with it unless you use MBR. Unfortunately while using MBR you can't use more than 2TB of it's capacity.

Keep in mind that this issue is not strictly related to capacity.
For example, if you were to buy a 500GB hard drive and use it as GPT, that too would be unable to be used as a boot device with your motherboard.
 
#7 ·
For 3TB HDDS
Windows 7 Fully support 3TB, Install win7 64Bit on 3tb hdd and it will boot

Winxp only can access 2TB maximum of 3TB HDD

Edit:
An optional choice to make any windows support 2+ TB is to use a raid card that has 2+TB support

Rerfer to Segate hdd 3tb support.
Thats where I got the info on the windows 3+tb support.
It says that windows 7 64bit fully supports 3TB or more
 
#8 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Iwamotto Tetsuz View Post

For 3TB HDDS
Windows 7 Fully support 3TB, Install win7 64Bit on 3tb hdd and it will boot
Yes his operating system supports it, but his motherboard does not. This causes an issue only when trying to boot from the drive.

Straight from Microsoft
Quote:
Note Windows only supports booting from a GPT disk on systems that contain Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot firmware.
Source: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn653580
 
#9 ·
Thanks for the info
edited my orignal post to take away the wrong information
which means any motherboard that boots a sata 3TB drive with wdinwos 7 install would operate and boot into windows
 
#10 ·
Many thanks Shadow11377 for the clarification.

Okay one last question.

You are sure about that "clone MBR disk and convert GPT with partition wizard 9.1" works on a new motherboard, right? Say you have done that at least once or seeing people did it before.

Not mean to be impolite, and if I sound like it, I apologize in advance. I just want some insurance before I head out to buy a new motherboard... possibly with a new i7 CPU as well. That is some money to spend.
 
#11 ·
I currently have Windows 7 Pro x64 installed on my 850 Evo which is formatted as an MBR drive.

Using the backup tool, I created a system image then restored that image to a WD Blue drive I had available. All went well and it was able to boot on the Blue just fine. I then shut down, booted from my Evo, used Partition Wizard 9.1 to convert the WD Blue from MBR to GPT and after doing this I was unable to boot from the WD Blue.

I tried to use the System Repair Disc to help fix the boot problem, and even though this disc is fine and has worked before, it gave me the following error.
Quote:
"This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair. Try using a recovery disc that is compatible with this version of windows."
Not sure I can help you much further but as for a suggestion I would recommend just biting the bullet and reinstalling windows on the new motherboard if you do decide to upgrade it. It's probably not worth the headache to keep it, especially since you'll have to do a reactivation anyway because activations/product keys are tied to the motherboard upon installation.

If you really do want/need to keep your install this should give some helpful info, not for the GPT conversion process but for the rest.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/135077-windows-7-installation-transfer-new-computer.html
 
#12 ·
Found this, my have info that you can use.

http://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50151.aspx

Found this as well.

http://superuser.com/questions/443561/clone-a-windows-installation-to-a-3tb-hard-drive-mbr-to-gpt

Taken from one of the posts.
Quote:
None of the answers so far gave me all the info I needed to solve this problem. I solved it and I'm successfully running my old Windows MBR install on UEFI and GPT now.

Connect only your target drive and run Windows 7 Setup in UEFI mode. You can do this by enabling UEFI in the BIOS and by using the DVD. It is possible to make a USB stick that UEFI boots, but the Microsoft tool will not make them so. Watch out for this.
Install Windows 7 clean to your target drive. You can confirm you're in UEFI mode as 3 partitions (EFI, MSR, and Main) will be created.
Connect your source drive and boot up an Ubuntu (or other linux) live CD/DVD/USB and use NTFSCLONE (from terminal with super user priv: 'sudo ntfsclone', syntax is easy to use from the help page) to copy your NTFS partition from your source drive and overwrite the main windows partition on your target drive. Watch out for the syntax of NTFSCLONE, it can have the target and source on the command line the other way round.
Disconnect source drive and enjoy your old install on the new drive.

From what I can see, instead of running boot code in the disk start, EFI simply runs boot code on the EFI FAT32 partition in a predetermined location, this boot code then starts the Windows installation. As we overwrite one that was set up correctly, it starts our old one up instead.

It has taken me literally days of fiddling to figure this all out and now hopefully others wont have to.

(Other notes: on my Intel DP43TF I had to update the BIOS and set the BIOS to IDE instead of AHCI for the Windows setup. I switched it back to AHCI after putting my old install onto the GPT drive and all was well)

Tested and working!
 
#13 ·
Okay. Cool. Thanks Shadow11377 for all the trouble you have went through. It clear out that picture in my head about gpt and mbr while my resource is limited. I guess I will do a clean install after all. Transparent migration seems impossible for now.

Also thank you everyone else for your time and suggestions. I have sure learned something new.
 
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