How to clone a hard drive to a different brand
Hard drives from different brands often have slight capacity variations that prevent you from physically cloning one directly to another. Instead, you have to use a tool like Clonezilla to copy the System, Reserved, and Recovery partitions at their exact original sizes while expanding the OS partition to fill the remaining unallocated space.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1leaving part of the drive unpartitioned
- 2cloning to a drive of larger advertised capacity
- 3allocating partitions with LVM and cloning logical volumes instead of the whole physical drive
- 4Using default cloning options and manually expanding the OS partition afterward using disk management tools.
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I'm worried that if I buy a 12 TB drive from another brand, it will have the capacity specified by SFF-8447 and I won't be able to physically clone one to the other.”source ↗
“Is there a way for clonezilla or something to clone exactly the System, Reserved, and Recovery partition so those stay the same size, while also expanding the OS partition all the way out to the right to fill the remaining unallocated space?”source ↗
Where this came up
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