Moving a Windows Boot parition to a new HDD

TwistedPsycho

Something I have never tried doing, and I suspect that someone like Hammyman might be more learned than I.

I currently run Windows 7 Ultimate on a rather old 60GB IDE HDD (with considerable Sata based storage with it). I have a redundant 250GB Sata HDD sat inside my beast (redundant as in formatted and empty doing nothing). Considering my IDE is running with about 4GB free I was thinking of moving the Windows installation to the Sata.

Now the plan I was concocting was to create an image of the IDE on the Sata then booting from that..... Would that work?

culpepper

I have heard of a program called 'raw copy' or something like that which supposedly copies from one drive to another bit by bit of data.
I think it was free.Dont know if you would be able to run it from the operating system it is copying from.

Baldur

Depending on the maker of your SATA drive, many manufacturers have utilities which will do what you want, e.g. WD, Seagate.

GeoffX

You could try using Clonezilla to do a "disk_to_local_disk" or "part_to_local_Part" to the 250GB drive. If the destination partition ends up as 60GB use Windows 7's Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management to expand it. Then change the boot device in your BIOS.

TwistedPsycho

Thanks everyone.

Culpepper raises an interesting point about copying files in use, so I might have to use a live CD to do it...

Might an interesting experiment though

debitcardmayhem

TwistedPsycho wrote: »

Thanks everyone.

Culpepper raises an interesting point about copying files in use, so I might have to use a live CD to do it...

Might an interesting experiment though

If you don't then the cloned one will need to chkdsk first. There is a thread about 7 restore on here using a SSD ie changing the disk layout sevenforums and another on using windows 7 system images too on the same forum.

There may also be issues with the MBR too but if you disconnect your IDE disk and boot the Sata the Win7 install disk should be able to sort that.

Edit Baldur has a point too , it depends if you have one of those disks. plus Maxtor do oi too

Gavin57

I have recently used HD Clone to move a complete hard drive to a larger hard drive. The hard drive was partitioned and the boot partition contained windows xp operating system. After cloning the disk I swopped it with the old disk. The new larger disk is now working away in my computer and all origional programmes and partitions arec there and appear to work ok. I think it was suggested that I chkdsk after the swap I did this it took a while but no errors were found.

kabayiri

I used dd in linux to copy a windows partition to another disk. I suspect Gparted will also do this in a more user-friendly package.

It took a while but it was fine.

debitcardmayhem

kabayiri wrote: »

I used dd in linux to copy a windows partition to another disk. I suspect Gparted will also do this in a more user-friendly package.

It took a while but it was fine.

Yep that too try systemrescuecd can be loaded on a usb stick too.