[v.voois]

I made an attempt to try cloning an IDE drive with 3 NTFS partitions, two of 10GB and one of 21GB, claiming approx. 41GB of HD space to an SSD drive that is attached to an IDE controller which is (or should be) ATA 33/66 compatible.
The original disk images were drawn from a 60GB drive at the time, but nowadays 160GB IDE drives are the lowest in the set to deliver.
When trying to work with the free edition of HDClone i was halted for the fact that i needed at least the basic edition to perform cloning from a 512B sector drive to a 4K sector drive.
I have been trying numerous of free drive and partition cloning solutions to get this cloning to work but the majority start claiming my credit card for the action i desire to perform with their tools. So does HD clone.
The only thing that kept me from licensing the other software is that the majority of paid tool developer honestly explained that cloning two different sector logic drives, cannot be cloned from one to another drive, specially not when the other drive was sector-wise sort of projected as 4K by the USB driver. HDClone claimed to be able to adapt cloning from a source sector logic that differs from the target sector logic. It however does not go into detail, to which extent it performs so. But currently, in my situation, it does not perform as desired.

To make a lot of stuff more clear, this is the Kingston 2,5 inch IDE SSD drive contraption i attempt to clone the content to


And with this USB converter construction, i attempted to clone the data between the source and target drive.

Source is officially jumpered as Master and the SSD drive is officially jumpered as slave. Windows also displays both drives and sizes correctly.
The data on the source, fits the target drive multiple times. the complete source partitions could be stored almost three times on the target drive without any adjustment to the partition size. So space availability is not the issue here.

I started to attempt by cloning the source drive first, i tried several options to copy from the source to the target,including different manual, automatic and no change option after the disak copy was performed, but the copy just seemed interrupted or stopped on an unexpected moment, however, that was not very clear from the screenshot i took from the situation...
Notice that the screenshot was after a Disk migration action, but the result for cloning was the same!



What was clear however is that HDClone left me with a raw partition of 79GB and no data submitted.


the last option i attempted was creating a disk image from the IDE unit and then restore the image back to the SSD.
Now in this case i got an error:


I'm sure you guys would consider inventing a way to push 8 sectors from drive X into 1 sector of drive Y, but i suspect this type of copy really would require some partition rendering and specific file-copy action to get a true disk clone from a 512Byte sector disk on any other sector sized drive. But so far i got one raw partition from HDClone, where as Clonezilla at least gave me three relatively sized raw partitions that somehow could contain the data from the source partitions.

I want to attach all the log-files, but your file-size limit of 256K makes attaching a complete session log for the Migrate and restore session impossible.

I'm not sure how to go from here, but HDClone was so far the only tool that sounded as promising as i required to have, but it did not turned out that promising for me either..
So i do hope i have missed an option to make this work, but if i could not try much more in the current software version, i hope development is eager to sort this one out and improve the product to get it better

[Alex]

By default, HDClone clones from one sector size to another sector size by adjusting everything, partition table, file systems etc.

This behavior is desired if you want to use the target disk as-is, i.e. inside the casing you used to make the copy. There are some discs out there (and some USB drives) that report a different sector size of 1K, 2K or 4K permanently. This is what you would want to use.

If on the other hand you want to remove the disc from the target enclosure and the disk outside of the enclosure reports a different sector size than inside the enclosure (happens a lot with USB-to-SATA converters, mostly with a JMicron chipset), then you would need to detract HDClone from making the sector size changes: the Checkbox "different sector size: adjust file systems" should be visible (and selectable) on the options page. You need to uncheck it.

The resulting target disk will not contain readable data in the enclosure, but removed from the enclosure, it will contain a normal partition table and a correct file system.


Also: if you don't use a different sector size disk as target (and plan to keep it there), be aware that such disks cannot be booted from (only UEFI-capable systems, i.e. Windows 8 and newer, and then only from GPT-partitioned systems) are capable of booting disks that are not 512 bytes per sector. Such disks can still be used as data disks, of course.