Moving Windows 8 to a 3TB drive, tips?

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Luke M
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Joined: Tue Jun 08, 2010 4:09 pm
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Moving Windows 8 to a 3TB drive, tips?

Post by Luke M » Thu Dec 26, 2013 2:57 am

Has anyone successfully moved Windows 8 to a >2TB drive? I've used Acronis Trueimage (the free version provided by Western Digital or Seagate) in the past and it's always worked great, but there are a lot of complications with >2TB drives.

These are the things I think I know:
1) MBR is limited to 2TB (or 2.2TB in drive maker terms)
2) GPT needed for >2TB
3) Windows supports GPT fine if you aren't booting from it, but...
4) Windows has limited support for GPT if booting: requires 64-bit and EFI BIOS

I have a bad feeling that the EFI crap is going to give me trouble. What happens if you convert an MBR drive with Windows to GPT? Will it still boot or will the EFI crap be missing? And if it's missing, will running repair fix it?

Luke M
Posts: 169
Joined: Tue Jun 08, 2010 4:09 pm
Location: here

Re: Moving Windows 8 to a 3TB drive, tips?

Post by Luke M » Fri Mar 14, 2014 6:18 pm

Followup in case somebody stumbles onto this via google...

Acronis Trueimage does support cloning a Windows MBR source drive onto a >2TB drive while converting to GPT and making it bootable in one simple step. You need an EFI BIOS and you need to boot into Acronis (CD/USB) in EFI mode. This is the easiest method.

An alternative method is to first install Windows on the target drive, and then clone the Windows partition using any NTFS cloning software (overwriting the Windows you just installed).

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