#Macrium reflect clone hard drive update#
#Macrium reflect clone hard drive driver#
#Macrium reflect clone hard drive windows#

If you receive the 'Incompatible Disk Selected' error shown above and you are using an external USB enclosure, then either try a different enclosure which doesn't change the reported disk sector size or directly attach the disk to a spare SATA port on your PC's motherboard. This is because the sector size will change and the partition structures on the disk will be unreadable. If you remove the disk from the enclosure then it cannot be read. But this is bad if you intend to clone to a disk in the enclosure and then use the cloned disk to boot your PC. Well yes, if the only purpose for the USB enclosure is to provide additional storage and you do not intend to take out the disk. If you are selling USB enclosures then this gives you a larger potential market and is a 'no-brainer' product feature.

#Macrium reflect clone hard drive windows#

So, by changing the reported disk sector size to 4096 Bytes for disks attached to the enclosure this enables all Windows PC's from XP onwards to be able to access disks greater then 2TB. If the reported sector size is changed to 4096 Bytes then MBR disks can be as large as 16 Terabytes and still be accessible by Windows. Note that GPT disks are not supported by Windows XP, however, MBR disks are supported by all Windows Operating Systems, including Windows XP.

Normally disks with 512 Bytes per sector that are larger than 2TB would need to be initialized using the GUID Partition Table (GPT) format. This happens regardless of the actual sector size of the attached disk and even if the disk supports 512e. We have identified that a number of recent external USB enclosures will 'fake' 4096 Bytes per sector disks and cause the error above. Since a sector is the smallest amount data that can be read or written to a disk this means that NTFS cannot directly read it's own data! 4K Disks that support Advanced Format 512e do not have this problem as these disks permit directly accessing 512 Bytes of data. If the entire file system is restored or cloned to a disk with a sector size of 4096 Bytes then each MFT record (at 1K) would be a quarter of a sector. For a 512 Bytes per sector disk this equates to 2 sectors. The MFT contains 'records' and each record is 1024 Bytes (1K) long if the disk sector size is 512 Bytes. The MFT is critical to the file system and defines all the files and directories. The NTFS file system contains a data structure called the Master File Table (MFT). This enables 4K disks to emulate 512 Byte sector size disks by providing an emulated sector size of 512 Bytes. To overcome Windows compatibility issues the majority of disks use a technology called Advanced Format 512e. These are sometimes referred to as 4K sector disks. With the advent of larger, multi Terabyte, disks the physical sector size has increased on some disks to 4096 Bytes.

#Macrium reflect clone hard drive driver#

Intel RST Driver DownloadĪ sector is the smallest addressable block on a disk and until recently all disks had a sector size of 512 Bytes.

#Macrium reflect clone hard drive update#

Note: If your PC uses ' Intel Rapid Storage Technology' (RST) also known as 'Intel Matrix Storage' then you may need to update the Intel Matrix/RST driver to the latest release when moving to a disk that supports Advanced Format 512e.