I picked up a new harddrive this week and decided to replace my current windows install with the new disk. Not looking forward to reinstalling windows I decided to try using transfering a disk image to the new drive. This is my story.
First, I decided to try using the built in Windows 7 drive image tool. Unfortunately it decided that several of my other partitions were also ‘system drives’. That meant it wanted to include them when creating the system image. That would take up a lot more room and who knows how it would handle one of the drives being removed and a new one added.
After poking around I decided the tool for the job was to be Clonezilla. I downloaded the ISO and burned it to disc. I then booted off the disc and backed up my windows partition onto my bigger secondary harddrive. This took about 20 or 30 minutes. Then I shut down the computer and took out my old drive and put in the new one. I booted into Clonezilla again tried to get it to restore the image to my new harddrive. Oops, Clonezilla didn’t see my new drive! Hmm, perhaps I could have messed with choosing the advanced settings instead of the basic ones, but I had a GParted disc laying around just begging to be used. I booted into GParted and told it to partition my new drive as NTFS. Then I booted back into Clonezilla and was able to do the restore operation. Hurray!
Once that was done I rebooted aaand whoops, no bootable disk was found. Ummm *panic*. Oh wait I read somewhere online about having to use the Windows 7 DVD to repair a startup problem after doing something like this. I booted from the Windows 7 disc and found the repair option (cunningly hidden in the corner of the big shiny “Install Now” page). I told it to check for startup problems. It did a quick check then told me to reboot. I did so and presto! Booted right into windows. I didn’t even have to enlarge the partition as it was already taking up the whole drive. Perhaps that was an interesting side effect of my foray into using GParted in the middle of the process. Oh well, I’m just happy it worked and I didn’t have to reinstall windows.
Total time taken: About 60-90 minutes.
