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Best way to copy contents of a drive to a drive on another HDD.


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#1 gbrao

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Posted 02 May 2022 - 08:37 AM

I have a 1 TB HDD (platter type, not SSD) with 6 partitions.

 

I just bought a 2TB HDD (platter type). I will create the exact same number of partitions on this HDD but each partition will have a larger size.

 

What is the best way to copy the contents of each partition to the new HDD.

 

Some of my partitions have more than 250GB of files. Is it advisable to just run a copy (using Windows copy or a sync program) ? Or is there a better way, for example one that can pause the copy every n seconds or n GB ?

 

I thought of using Ghost (partition to partition), but if I am not mistaken, Ghost will also change the size of the destination partition to match the source.


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#2 antonino61

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Posted 02 May 2022 - 12:12 PM

I would use minitool partition wizard (partition to partition mode)



#3 gbrao

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Posted 02 May 2022 - 01:22 PM

I would use minitool partition wizard (partition to partition mode)

I'll try it out. thanks. will also confirm if ghost resizes the destination partition.


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#4 gbrao

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Posted 04 May 2022 - 03:20 PM

Ghost :

I used Disk Genius to create the (larger) partitions on the new HDD.

Used Ghost option Partition-to-Partition .

Strangely all the partitions after the one I copied were deleted. I did something wrong? Not sure. The source and destination partitions were logical partitions on a MBR HDD. I also a popup briefly saying something like 'modifying boot files'.

Gave up on Ghost.

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What I did :

I used Disk Genius to create the (larger) partitions on the new HDD.

Used a sync program to copy all file on a partition to another on the new HDD.

Worked OK.

But lots of fragmentation.

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What I should have done :

Used Disk Genius to create the (larger) partitions on the new HDD.

Used Disk Genius 'Clone/Copy Partition ->Clone partition by files' https://www.diskgeni...e-partition.php

 

Clone partition by files: Copies all files from source partition to destination partition by analyzing data organizing structure. Files in destination partition will be reorganized and there won't be fragments. The cloning works as long as destination partition is able to hold files to be cloned in source partition.

 

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Sorry, I did not try Partition Wizard. I think it can only copy a partition to free space on a HDD (it does create a partition there, I'm sure :-). That is, from the documentation I could not find a option to copy all files from a existing partition to another existing partition. But I'm not sure of this.

 

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EDIT : 16th May 2022.

 

Actually it looks like Windows Robocopy would be the best choice.

 

I tried it with the /MIR parameter and I got NO fragmentation in the destination drive. Quite fast too.




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