About drive-to-drive copying options

When you copy a drive from one hard drive to another, you can use the drive-to-drive copying options.

The following table describes the options for copying from one hard drive to another.

Table: Drive-to-drive copying options

Option

Description

Check source for file system errors

Check the source drive for errors before you copy it. The source drive is the original drive.

Check destination for file system errors

Check the destination drive for errors after you copy the drive. The destination drive is the new drive.

Resize drive to fill unallocated space.

This option automatically expands the drive to occupy the destination drive's remaining unallocated space.

Set drive active (for booting OS)

Make the destination drive the active partition (the drive from which the computer starts). Only one drive can be active at a time. To boot the computer, it must be on the first physical hard disk, and it must contain an operating system. When the computer boots, it reads the partition table of the first physical hard disk to find out which drive is active. It then boots from that location. If the drive is not bootable or you are not certain if it is, have a boot disk ready. You can use the Symantec Recovery Disk CD.

The Set drive active option is valid for basic disks only (not dynamic disks).

Disable SmartSector copying

The SmartSector technology from Symantec speeds up the copying process by only copying the clusters and sectors that contain data. However, in a high-security environments, you might want to copy all clusters and sectors in their original layout, regardless of whether they contain data.

Ignore bad sectors during copy

This option copies the drive even if there are errors on the disk.

Copy MBR

This option copies the master boot record from the source drive to the destination drive. Select this option if you are copying the C:\ drive to a new, empty hard drive. You should not select this option if you want to copy a drive to another space on the same hard drive as a backup. You should also not select this option if you want to copy the drive to a hard drive that has existing partitions that you do not want to replace.

Destination partition type

Click Primary partition to make the destination (new) drive a primary partition.

Click Logical partition to make the destination (new) drive a logical partition inside an extended partition.

Drive letter

Select the drive letter you want assigned to the partition from the Drive letter list