Trouble cloning hard drive. Need help! (Pavilion DV6-6131us) [ Edited ]

[Dime]

I recently purchased a 1TB external hard drive which I decided I wanted to install into my laptop. I spent the better part of yesterday working on cloning the old hard drive to the new hard drive. First I tried Clonezilla, but kept on running into a error about drive size, so I threw that out and grabbed Macrium Reflect. After a little over 8 hours (it finished at about 3 AM) the drive was cloned. Today I switched the drives and tried booting off the 1TB only to end up with a message stating "Missing Operating System," so i switched the drives back.

I went back and looked at the drives and noticed that the HP_TOOLS partition hadn't cloned correctly. On the original drive the partition is 103MB FAT32 with 7.9mb used, but on the clone the drive is 103MB RAW unformatted. after a few minutes of tinkering around i fnally decided to try deleting the RAW partition and creating one manually through Disk Management. When I tried to create a 103MB FAT32 simple partition, I received a message stating the indicated size was too small for the specified file system, and I ended up with another 103MB RAW partition.

I'm almost certain this is why Clonezilla didn't work and why after using Reflect, I got the Missing Operating System message.  So how do i clone this partition if the partition can't be made with FAT32, and how did HP manage to do this in the first place?

[CherylG]

Why not just install the new hdd, boot with Recovery Disks to install to factory specs?

 If you have data/programs that you don't won't to lose  I would just make an Image of the C partition to DVD or external USB hdd..then restore the image of C to C after installing via Recovery Disks.

[Dime]

Mainly because of the time involved. I'm a college student, and I use my laptop in school constantly, however, this week I have spring break, so I have some free time for this. However, starting from scratch will take a few days to get everything reinstalled and to copy files over manually from the old hard drive and my desktop to the new HDD. If I can successfully clone the HDD, the whole process will take about 10 hours, give or take an hour. If I install factory spec, then i have to reinstall each program I use manually. This means Office, Adobe, Quickbooks, and a about 5 other major program suites, then I have to reinstall all the minor programs, then redo all my settings, then copy a ton of music, videos, and other media over as well. The entire process will take several days and I would like to have at least a day or two of my break to enjoy relaxing rather than tech nerding. I send enough of my weekends playing geek squad for friends and relatives as it is.

[CherylG]

Uhh, I suggested creating an Image of the C partition,  using Recovery Disks to get the new hdd set up as per factory. Then restore the Image of C to C which would include all of your programs,music,etc.

[Dime]

That image would be about 300gb. I currently only have the internal 500gb in the laptop and the 1tb target drive for the upgrade. I don't have a third hard drive to store the image and it would take about 70 or so blank dvd's to image the C partition.

[CherylG]

An Image is a compressed file. Just checked my external hdd and my backup Image is just a little less than 20gb in size. You are right though, still impractical if you don't have an external hdd for backup.

[Dime]

yup. Which leads me back to the cloning issue.

[CherylG]

This is what I would try. Use Disk Management in Windows to create two partitions on the new hdd. Make the second partition about 100gb. Next use Macrium to Image the current hdd, minus the Tools partition and save the Image to the second partition. Don't forget to make the boot cd with Macrium. Next install the new hdd and boot with the Macrium cd. Choose to restore an Image and use the one saved to the second partition.

If that doesn't work, I am fresh out of ideas. I have used Macrium for a long time and like it.I even used this same technique recently on a machine with no extra back up hdd.