image mbr but restore to gpt

[Bob Coleman]

OldNavyGuy,

Restoring (or copying) a MBR partition image to a GPT disk doesn't make the GPT disk into a MBR disk. It remains GPT.
Restoring a disk image is different.

I don't think so...

RESTORING an MBR image (source) to a GPT drive will change the partition style to be the same as the source.

COPYING an MBR image to a GPT drive (such as archiving multiple images) will not.

Brian didn't say to restore or copy an image. He said to restore or copy the partition, not an image of the parition.

[Bob Coleman]

I think I should have stayed out of this. However, rereading and trying to dig myself out of a hole, I now see that Brian did, at one point, refer to "Restoring (or copying) a MBR partition image ...".

However his original advice was "Just use IFW, BootIt, etc to copy the 1 TB partition to Free Space on your 20 TB drive".

No mention there of either "restore" or "image".

[TeraByte Support]

If you restore or copy a partition, it doesn't change the target, if you do an entire drive operation restore or copy, it would (unless a specific type is chosen for restore via special command line options).

mbr partitions are limited to 32bit sectors, if the (interfaced) sector size is 512 bytes, 2TiB limit, if 4K then 16TiB.

[OldNavyGuy]

if you do an entire drive operation restore or copy, it would

Which seems to be the subject of the thread...

[engineerguy3809]

Thanks all for quick replies.
I was successful in accomplishing my task, but eventually did not use IFW to do it.
No matter how I tried (and likely there was a way and I just missed it) the restored image into the 20TB drive would only appear as only a much smaller drive. The extra space shows up, but as Terabyte Support noted, there is a maximum NUMBER of clusters Windows can support. After a restore, I was NOT able to expand into the unused space and got an error that the number of clusters exceeds Windows capabilities. The source image uses 4k clusters so the image restores as 4k clusters regardless of what the target drive starts out with. I believe the minimum cluster size in Windows to support 20TB is 8k, so that seems to be the glitch. With my image restored ON the Target drive, and a lot of space on the 20TB drive that Windows cannot expand into because cluster size is too small, the only utility I'm aware of that says it can change cluster size WITHOUT DATA LOSS is the PAID version of [a third party utility]. Kinda expensive for a one-time use (even if it works as advertised).

My solution? As much as I love IFW (used it for about 15 years now for routine backups), I simply utilized Windows 10 default Disk Management app, initialized the 20TB drive (as GPT of course), created a new single 20TB volume and formatted it with 16k clusters. I bumped the cluster size above the minimum of 8k because I didn't really care if some efficiency in file storage space was lost, 8k would have probably worked as well, but I wanted to be sure that was the problem. I then manually copied the folder structure from my old 1TB drive into the new 20TB drive at the root level so it recreated sub-folders where they existed. Since this was basically a file copy, not imaging, Windows left the 16k clusters on the 20TB target intact and just moved the data. All this only took as long as it did to type this, but the computer then took several hours yesterday to actually move all my old data. When finished, it works fine.

Thanks again for the discussion.

[TeraByte Support]

If using an image you can use the CopyWin.TBS script to restore in those situations where it's a boot partition. But in general, for generic data partitions, you can do that.