For those of you who may have been following my crazy journey to clone my Compaq HD last week, this is a related question.

Using Casper XP cloning software, I tried everything for 2 weeks to clone my 80GB HD to a new 250GB HD. But it just wouldn't boot to Windows (XP SP2).

Long story short, Compaq uses a 2nd partition on their HD's (D) to store recovery info (per HP tech support) that is 3.9GB.

My cloning software was creating a proportionate size partition on the 250GB drive for D, so it was about 12GB.

That turned out to be the problem with the failure to boot. When I manually adjusted the D partition to 3.9GB, everything worked normally.

It's been bugging me all week. Why is that an issue? If it's just a recovery partition, what would it's size have to do with booting up. The OS is still on the C partition (per HP). I even considered deleting the D partion completely since I don't seem to need it now that I have my cloned backup drive, but now I'm concerned that this may cause another boot problem.

Can anyone explain this so I can sleep at night?

Thanks...

What I have used successfully in the past is HDClone - it mad an exact copy of the partiion and operating system matching the original hard drive, bit by bit - making an exact duplicate

Meaning, my original drive was 80gb and the new drive was 160gb - so when done, my new 160gb was partitioned to 80gb with all of my original drive info on it

With this being said, I had to create a drive with the remaining 80gb of free space on the new drive using Paragon Partition Mangager and then format the drive created

So I now have a C: and D; drive on my 160gb drive, but with the partition mgr, you could make it all 160gb c: drive if I wanted to - User preference on partitioning of course.

If interested,
Miray Software - hard disk copy, hard disk backup, hard disk rescue (http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html)


And when 'cloned' I put the 160gb drive as master and the PC booted into windows just like the 80gb did before not missing a beat

Thanks Hwk,

Casper works pretty much the same, but it allows you to adjust the partition size in one step.

On my other PC with only one partition, casper took me from an 80GB drive to a perfectly bootable 250GB drive in 1 step.

I was just wondering why my 2 partition PC wouldn't boot until I made the D partition the same size as original (3.9GB)?

Don't know on that one, not sure if casper has a home page but see if it does and they have a fourm, FAQ or troubleshooting section and check any help files that may have come with it
- Hope you find answer as for some reason it makes sense but at the same time it doesn't

Mitch,
Without knowing the contents of the recovery partition, I would have to guess that it is formated like a DVD and not a true NTFS partition. If this is the case, then anything over the 4-1/2 GB partition size would make it unusable.

Thanks for helpful info.

ChuckH - All I know is the C partition is NTFS, and the 3.9GB D partition is FAT 32 (whatever that means). Would that limit the size of the partition as you described to 4.5GB?

ChuckH - I took your suggestion and Googled it. Lots of sites indicate a partition limit for FAT32 of 4GB (minus 1 byte), so it sounds like you nailed it.

But to add to the confusion, there were more than several sites that indicated a partition size limit for FAT32 ranging from 2GB to 32GB.?

Based on my personal experience, 4GB seems to be the magic number.

Your thoughts?