Cloning from 2TB to 4TB on Boot drive ..How?

[questorfla]

I recently made a half-hearted attempt with Macrium 5 to try to get from a 2 TB MBR to a 4TB GPT and (of course) failed.  I thought maybe someone out there might know of a way to accomplish this without having to deal with multiple partitions.  This system is nothing but a giant file server but the storage layout is such that it would be best if it could all be kept in a single drive partition to get the best use of the space.  If I have to do it, I will just start from scratch on the 4TB and load it with Windows 8.1.  Then load the necessary software and copy over the data.  But that would be tedious.

My next concern is backups.  In the past, I have used Macrium to do a complete clone of the drive onto a second 2 TB drive every 4 months.  In between , only the added data in C: drive is backup up to the Clone.  The reason for the full copy every 4 months is to be sure to get  all the updates that had been loaded to the program files on the main drive  to also be the same on the backup drive.  All was fine until I was handed  a Huge amount of old data files. to add to the mix. 
Enough that it would have put the 2TB drive, close to 90% capacity so I thought might as well go to 4TB now instead of waiting.

This was the first time I have had to deal with GPT at all and has not been much fun.  The first attempt with Macrium using the 4TB setup as a GPT drive and cloning the 2TB MBR drive onto it resulted in a mixed mess of partitions.  It could  boot and lost no files but ended up with about half the drive as "unreachable".  I believe that Macrium converted the 4T back to MBR before or during the cloning.  This would explain the "lost 2TB of Space"  which i could see but could not partition or use.

This worried me a little as to what would happen if I DID reload the system on the 4TB drive from scratch under GPT and then run a clone from one GPT-4TB to another GPT-4TB...I would assume they would both stay that way?  I tried asking this on the Macrium forum and got a loy of mixed replies.  This is a real Paid for copy of Macrium 5 and says it has full GPT support but I am not sure if it can be used to get from MBR to GPT the first time so just wondered if anyone here has tried it.  and afterward, I certainly hope it would stay with GPT on the Cloned backup.

[4wd]

I'm going to start again 

Are you replacing the 2TB with a 4TB?
Can the motherboard boot from a GPT drive?

If it can, you can convert an MBR to GPT supposedly with no data loss, although I'd make sure you had at two backups, using something like AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro.

[Shades]

When applying 3TByte disks in my computers I always had to use software from Seagate that enabled my computers to make use of storage capacity above 2TByte and always ended up with 2 (GPT) partitions in the process (one of 2TByte and one with the remaining storage space). Happened even on a Asus motherboard that I bought less than a year ago.

There is lots of software to transfer software from one disk to another. The suggestion from 4wd is a good one.

If you have the time the free version of HDClone works very well. Spend money to unlock speed and a boatload of options. Runs from optical medium or pen drive.
MiniTool Partition Wizard also comes in free/commercial versions, also very reliable.
Eassos Partition Guru, again free/commercial, which works nice for cloning/converting partitions.

Those 3 pieces of software I know and trust, but there are still a lot of others: EaseUs and Paragorn are also well known and have free versions for you to try.

[Stoic Joker]

The issue as I understand it is booting to a partition larger than 2TB, not necessarily having one. If this is to be a file server, then the goal IMO should be to have a maximum sized single storage partition. There is no valid reason why the users would need access to the file servers OS files.

Put the OS on a separate 100GB partition. Then copy over the old 2GB partition, convert it to GPT, and resize it to take up the rest of the remaining space.

When applying 3TByte disks in my computers I always had to use software from Seagate that enabled my computers to make use of storage capacity above 2TByte and always ended up with 2 (GPT) partitions in the process (one of 2TByte and one with the remaining storage space). Happened even on a Asus motherboard that I bought less than a year ago.

-Shades (November 30, 2014, 06:27 AM)

I remember Seagate's DDO software from years ago (Win2k days), when the IIRC 8 GB limit was all the rage. It had three very bad habits then...that I would still suspect it of pulling now:

It never verified if it's presence was actually necessary, it just auto installed.
It made it impossible for Win2k to boot, because it was just in the way.
It was next to impossible to find and remove - I basically had to beat it to death with a hammer while suffering through a ton of dire and ominous "warnings" before it finally released its demonic hold on the drive. Now after the exorcism the drive - which previously couldn't make it through the 2k install without BSODing - ran Win2k perfectly for several years.

[4wd]

It was next to impossible to find and remove - I basically had to beat it to death with a hammer while suffering through a ton of dire and ominous "warnings" before it finally released its demonic hold on the drive.

-Stoic Joker (November 30, 2014, 10:08 AM)

Wow ... you managed to remove that crap from a drive?  I must have given up way too early 

@Shades: Forgot about the MiniTool one even though I use it occasionally.

[questorfla]

I got it to work.  Thanks for all the help from everyone.  I hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving too.  Trying to get this to work while also in the middle of Family Time was just a little stressful.  The RIGHT way is always the best way.
Format the 4TB under GPT when you load windows 8.1 to start with.  It creates 4 partitions instead of the usual 2 but they aren't that big other than the single 3.8 TB C drive which is all I needed,
Once created, Macrium had no problem "recreating" it for backup either.  So all ends well.

By the way, where do you adjust the spellcheck settings for the forum?  Or is it a One size fits all thing?