HDD Block size?

Judahnator · April 7, 2015

A friend of mine came to me with a full hard drive. He asked if i could clone his 150GB drive to a brand new 2TB drive.

I have done this before, it is usually no problem. However, i ran into something i was not sure of.

The old hard drive has a block size of 512 and the new one reports 4096. Could i just tell "dd" to do 512? or would that cause problems?

Captain_WD · April 8, 2015

A friend of mine came to me with a full hard drive. He asked if i could clone his 150GB drive to a brand new 2TB drive.

I have done this before, it is usually no problem. However, i ran into something i was not sure of.

The old hard drive has a block size of 512 and the new one reports 4096. Could i just tell "dd" to do 512? or would that cause problems?

Hey Judahnator,

You should be good. If you encounter problems you can also do a system image of the old drive and restore it on the new drive. This way you can avoid any potential problems and compatibility issues. Here's some info on restoring images: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/restore-computer-from-system-image-backup#1TC=windows-7

Captain_WD.

Judahnator · April 8, 2015

Hey Judahnator,

You should be good. If you encounter problems you can also do a system image of the old drive and restore it on the new drive. This way you can avoid any potential problems and compatibility issues. Here's some info on restoring images: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/restore-computer-from-system-image-backup#1TC=windows-7

Captain_WD.

That is not a bad idea! I didnt even think about that one.

It turned out not being a problem, he found a disk-cloner in his basement and that did the trick for him. But for future reference, ill definitely give this a shot.