Friday, February 15, 2013

Clone the drive, can't do a partition copy!

I was trying to move Windows 7 Pro 64-bit from a 250 Gig drive to a 1 terabyte drive that was partitioned.  I used Easus ToDo Backup Free Edition to copy the C: partition from the 250 Gig drive to one of the partitions on the 1 terabyte drive.  To my surprise, the system wouldn't boot with the 1 terabyte drive.  It wouldn't boot with the 250 Gig drive either!  I was really up the creek.  Luckily, the data on the terabyte drive could be read from my Windows 8 computer and I copied the C:\User data over to a partition on my Windows 8 desktop.

I had forgotten that Windows 7 (and 8) have some stuff on another hidden partition!  CRAP!  Lesson learned.  Clone the drives, don't copy partitions over!

I then proceeded to reinstall Windows 7 Pro from scratch.  This might not be a bad thing though.  This particular computer would sometimes not start and I had to shut the power off and try again (and select boot as normal instead of startup repair which did nothing).  So after several hours with all Windows updates and Windows 7 SP1 installed, I cloned the 1 terabyte drive back to the old 250 Gig drive and then disconnected the 1 terabyte drive to check if the system would boot with the 250 gig drive.  Success!  The 250 Gig drive will now be disconnected and the 1 terabyte drive reconnected.  The 250 gig drive will be my basic Windows 7 Pro backup in case I ever have problems.  My system is now upgraded with a 1 terabyte hard drive.  Now to install all the software back!

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