[BigMackCam]

I'm hoping someone here with better technical skills than me can help...

I'm trying to upgrade the 1TB hard drive in my HP laptop to a 2TB unit that I just bought, but - having never done this before - I'm running into some difficulties.

The existing drive has a number of partitions on it (see attached image), including the NTFS Primary partition for Windows which is 908GB (see attached image). What I want to do is effectively clone my existing drive onto the new drive, but with an extended Windows partition of approximately 1.8TB. I've cloned partitions 1, 2, 3 and 4, then extended partition 4 to 1.8TB. But when I start to clone partition 5, the software I'm using gives me a message warning me that the Windows partition will be overwritten.

I'm obviously going about this the wrong way, so here I am pleading for assistance! Can anyone advise how to achieve this - ie. a "cloned" drive but with one of the partitions extended?

Thanks in advance!!

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[MarkJerling]

Are you using Macrium Reflect Mike?

[BigMackCam]

Yes, Mark - the free version, though I'm happy to buy the paid version if necessary...

[MarkJerling]

I think the paid version will give you more options, in that it allows selective file restoration.

[bxf]

I've performed similar operations several times over the years. The last time was quite recently, and I vaguely recall running into a glitch somewhat similar to yours. I was unable to understand the problem, but the solution was to first use Partition Wizard (free; Partition Magic, also free, will do as well) to partition the new disc exactly as I wanted it, and then use Macrium Reflect to restore each partition to its relative target.

FWIW, I've never had to do anything that was beyond the capabilities of any of the free versions of the mentioned software.

[southlander]

Is Partition 5 which you are attempting to clone over to the new drive a system partition? If one of the other new partitions you have already created is also a system partition, I suspect you are not allowed two system partitions and therefore you are getting an error message.

That's my quick'n'dirty guess from 10,000 miles away!

[BigMackCam]

Aha! Success... I'm not sure if my approach was technically efficient, but...

I started again and cloned partitions 1, 2 and 3 exactly... then, I cloned my Windows partition 4 and extended it to 1.8TB during the cloning process. To clone partitions 5 & 6 without overwriting the main Windows partition, I had to create image back-ups and restore them individually.

The new hard drive is in and all appears to be well... I'm just running through my applications and data at the moment to make sure everything's still here, but I have the old drive safely stored away in case I need to get at it again. I'll give it a few weeks, then if all appears to be well, I'll format it and install it in a USB 3.0 external drive enclosure. It'll make a handy backup disk for my photos.

Thanks for the responses, all