jsexton
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Copied hard disk but still have 4kb clusters!
I just bought a 20.5gb Western Digital 7200RPM hard disk to replace my 8.4 - I configured the new disk as drive C and the old 8.4 as D and ran Western Digital's EZ-BIOS utility to copy the old drive to the new (I didn't actually install EZ-BIOS - I just used the partition/copy utility on the disk. Both disks are FAT32.
The cluster size copied is still 4kb though, and Windows has problems with disks over 8gb when less than 8kb clusters are used. The only problems I see are with Scandisk/Defrag reporting Out of Memory errors.
I tried to use Partition Magic 4.0 to resize the clusters from 4k to 16k, but it runs for a minute or 2 before giving an Out of Memory error! I cannot squeeze any more conventional memory out of my bootdisk. Any ideas on what else I can use? I have Ghost 5.0 but will that resize the cluster size?
Thanks!
The cluster size copied is still 4kb though, and Windows has problems with disks over 8gb when less than 8kb clusters are used. The only problems I see are with Scandisk/Defrag reporting Out of Memory errors.
I tried to use Partition Magic 4.0 to resize the clusters from 4k to 16k, but it runs for a minute or 2 before giving an Out of Memory error! I cannot squeeze any more conventional memory out of my bootdisk. Any ideas on what else I can use? I have Ghost 5.0 but will that resize the cluster size?
Thanks!
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> Then partition the whole 20Gb drive as a Primary DOS drive.
Hmmm. MS DOS is restricted to a maximum partition-size of '02Gb' (not '20Gb').
Hmmm. MS DOS is restricted to a maximum partition-size of '02Gb' (not '20Gb').
ASKER
Thanks Otta - finally realized that to copy a partition in PM you have to delete the partition of the destination drive first (guess that makes sense but it could have at least asked if I wanted to overwrite, then it could delete the partition for me instead of just graying out the option to copy).
Anyway, I ended up resizing the clusters on the old hard disk to 16kb (had to do it in two steps - first to 8k then to 16k), then I copied the partition to the new hard disk. This resulted in an 8.4gb partition on the 20.5gb disk, but finally with the correct size clusters. Then, like you suggested, I just resized the partition to 20.5gb, so now I have the whole mess on one partition. Thanks for the help!
Is there anything out there better than PM? It's ok, but I want something that will do everything in one step (copy from small hard disk to large hard disk, resize partition, and resize clusters automatically to FAT32 defaults for drive size). Is PM 5 much better than 4?
Thanks everyone for all your help!
Jon
Anyway, I ended up resizing the clusters on the old hard disk to 16kb (had to do it in two steps - first to 8k then to 16k), then I copied the partition to the new hard disk. This resulted in an 8.4gb partition on the 20.5gb disk, but finally with the correct size clusters. Then, like you suggested, I just resized the partition to 20.5gb, so now I have the whole mess on one partition. Thanks for the help!
Is there anything out there better than PM? It's ok, but I want something that will do everything in one step (copy from small hard disk to large hard disk, resize partition, and resize clusters automatically to FAT32 defaults for drive size). Is PM 5 much better than 4?
Thanks everyone for all your help!
Jon
> I ended up resizing the clusters on the old hard disk to 16kb (had to do it in two steps - first to 8k then to 16k), then I copied the partition to the new hard disk.
I would have first copied your old hard-disk, and then do the rest of the work on the "copy" of your hard-drive.
That way, if something went wrong, you could just start all over again, rather than restoring your old hard-drive from the backup (of course, you *DID* take a backup before you started, correct?).
> Is there anything out there better than PM?
Not in my experience, although PM is so good that I haven't seriously looked at the alternatives ("Ranish" and "Partition-It").
> I want something that will do everything in one step (copy from small hard disk to large hard disk, resize partition, and resize clusters automatically to FAT32 defaults for drive size).
With PM Versions 4 and 5, you can tell PM to "do 'A', then do 'B', then do 'C'", and then you click the 'Apply' button, and PM does what you want, step-by-step, without further user-intervention.
> Is PM 5 much better than 4?
Better? Yes. Much better? No.
Having a "bootable rescue-disk", which invokes a GUI-based copy of PM5 is very nice; there was a "text-only" version of PM4, if you had your own boot-disk, but you had to be a regular user of PM4 to feel comfortable "navigating" through the text-only menus in PM4.
I would have first copied your old hard-disk, and then do the rest of the work on the "copy" of your hard-drive.
That way, if something went wrong, you could just start all over again, rather than restoring your old hard-drive from the backup (of course, you *DID* take a backup before you started, correct?).
> Is there anything out there better than PM?
Not in my experience, although PM is so good that I haven't seriously looked at the alternatives ("Ranish" and "Partition-It").
> I want something that will do everything in one step (copy from small hard disk to large hard disk, resize partition, and resize clusters automatically to FAT32 defaults for drive size).
With PM Versions 4 and 5, you can tell PM to "do 'A', then do 'B', then do 'C'", and then you click the 'Apply' button, and PM does what you want, step-by-step, without further user-intervention.
> Is PM 5 much better than 4?
Better? Yes. Much better? No.
Having a "bootable rescue-disk", which invokes a GUI-based copy of PM5 is very nice; there was a "text-only" version of PM4, if you had your own boot-disk, but you had to be a regular user of PM4 to feel comfortable "navigating" through the text-only menus in PM4.
ASKER
Thanks for the extra comments! And *yes* I did have a backup :-) I had actually already resized the clusters on the old hdd to 16kb before I received your post; it would have saved me some time if I had realized that I could do both at once.
Jon
Jon
Try an Fdisk and then make sure that large HDD support is chosen on the first option.
Then partion the whole 20Gb drive as a Primary DOS drive.
If that is not successful do a boot of the Ghost disk and do a partition copy of the 8GB drive to the new one, try a reboot after this is done, if it is successful then go back and repartition the rest of the new disk to a 12GB as a second drive ie: d: I hope this is of some help
Regards
Aidan