Need some help understanding what happened with a drive clone

SNGX1275

Posts: 10,615   +467
Backstory (skip this if you are in a hurry): Back in early December 2012 I installed Windows 8 to a spare 400 gig SATA drive that I had. Played with it for a while, and then went back to Windows 7 on a separate hard drive. I got a little bored and my Windows 7 install was as old as Windows 7 itself, I never reinstalled, and the drive didn't die on me, so I shifted a bunch of data around on my other drives and was able to free up a 1.5TB enough that I thought I'd just wipe it and clone over my Windows 8 install. Long story short, I couldn't get it to clone, turns out it was because I was using GPT rather than MBR and that 400 gig I put 8 on was MBR.

I had a 2TB Seagate hard drive that I have suspected was dying for months but couldn't get it to fail any diagnostic tests. HD Tune did give a warning that there were too many CRCs with it, but outside of that, my only indications that the drive was dying was my ears. It was making some bad clicks on occation, some googling indicated a lot of people were concerned with clicks from the drive but that it was just the drive's power saving 'features'. I was not convinced, I've had a lot of drives die, I know what they sound like. But, alas, still couldn't get it to fail a diagnostic test.

Last week I finally got the drive to fail a long test, and RMA'd the drive. Since the replacement drive is much faster than the 400 gig 8 is currently on, I thought I'd clone it over.

The problem: Initialized the 'new' 2TB as MBR. Booted from EaseUS Disc Copy and cloned the 400GB over to the 2TB. Before officially beginning the clone, I was able to see the before and after of the drive. It was showing as 2TB unpartitioned. When it was done it was going to have a 400GB partition and the rest unpartitioned.

I cloned it, removed the 400GB, put the 2TB on the same cable the 400GB was on and booted. Booted into Win 8 just fine, but I wanted to shrink that partition down to say 200GB so I could take the data off the dying 2TB and put it on roughly the 1.8TB I was going to have remaining.

To my surprise, both Disk Management and EaseUS Partition Master are only showing its total size to be 931.53GB (1TB). Now MBR is limited to 2TB drives, but this is a 2TB drive, so not having it as GPT shouldn't be the problem here.

I don't understand why this is happening. Thoughts?

I'm about to boot with a gParted disk and see what it displays for the disk, but I'm not hopeful. Update: gParted shows the same. the 2TB drive mysteriously transformed to 1TB after the clone.

Update 2: Following a suggestion from LNCPapa I booted off the gParted CD and wiped the 400 gig partition, so I had 935GB unpartitioned space. Then I powered down, completely (power off, switched switch off in the back, pressed power button on front panel). Powered back on and booted into gParted again. Still showing as 1TB. Rebooted with the EaseUS Disk Copy CD, it showed the drive as 1TB unpartitioned.

At this point there are 2 different non Windows environments telling me 1TB. So I connect the 400GB drive back and boot into Windows. Launch SeaTools, quickly run a Short DST and a Fast FixAll. Then I went to Drive Information from within SeaTools. Reports as Max LBA: 1953569133. So I take that number, multiply by 512bytes, and then convert that to TB. 0.909702, so 1 TB rather than 2 TB.

Checked for a firmware update. I have the latest firmware.

Powered down, disconnected the drive. Connected it to a USB SATA dock I have connected to a ppc Mac (Powerbook G4 running OS X 10.5). Powered the drive up, got a message that the drive could not be read and do I want to initialize. I let it, open up Disk Utility. 935GB.

Somehow the drive went from showing as 2TB for a couple boots and the cloning process to 1TB after the clone.

Only explanation I can come up with is it is a faulty drive.

I will try to do a live chat with Seagate customer service in the morning and get this shipped back to them.

Will update with what I do.


Really glad I didn't spend a few hours cloning over the 2TB it is replacing only to ship back the dying one and then have this new one spontaneously drop to half its size. But then again, maybe filling it 75% full right away would have prevented this mess.
 
Problem fixed. Seagate chat indicated that I should use SeaTools for DOS and that it has an option to set max capacity. I ran it and it went back to 2TB. Then I did a clone with Seagate DiskWizard. It just made that 400GB drive I was cloning all in 1 big partition on my 2TB, which wasn't what I wanted to happen, but gParted resized it down for me. Things seem to be working normally now, but I'm doing a SFC just to make sure no Windows files got truncated/corrupted in the partition shrink, that shouldn't happen of course, but I want to be sure before I get too invested in this (and end up wiping the 400 GB drive at some point for additional storage).
 
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