I recently purchased myself a new 1tb western digital black hard drive, as an upgrade from my current 500gb seagate. What i have been trying to do is copy everything over from the 500gb drive to the 1tb drive. I have managed partial success at this using acronis true image. What i now want to do is use that drive as the boot drive. However I have encountered a couple of problems doing this. 1. I do not know how to set it up as a bootable drive. 2. I know that i would have to change the drive letters around, how would I do this? - my attempt at doing it vistas way just tells me that I cant change the letter of the boot drive. I really don't want to have to reinstall vista again, so how would i do this. (Im going to try removing the 500gb hard drive and swapping around the sata connectors to see if that will work)
If you want to boot off a cloned disk, you'll need to rebuild the master boot record. Instructions can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392 Basically, use the Vista CD to boot to the recovery command prompt and type in: bootrec.exe You can also try the switches: bootrec.exe /fixmbr (fix master boot record) bootrec.exe /fixboot (fix boot sector) bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd (compleatly rebuild the entire BCD) Edit: I'd do this with only the cloned drive attached, should you have more than one hard drive in your computer btw. There shouldn't be a problem, but it's best to be safe. .
Thanks for the link, from what I can see this just makes the disk bootable. Does the /RebuildBcd switch allow all programs to be re directed to the new drive or will all current installations just be screwed?
Well, I'm writing this from a cloned Vista OS drive where I used the /rebuildbcd switch. Didn't need to reinstall anything so I guess it works. The difference being, I used DriveImage XML from a Win PE boot disk. Cloned the drives disk to disk then booted off the Vista CD to the recovery command prompt. bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd seemed to do the trick. The only difference, in DriveImage XML there is the option to set a new Disk ID. Tools > Set new Disk ID, I can't remember it doing a lot though.
I'd recommend you just use CloneZilla LiveCD. It will clone disk to disk including expanding (or not expanding it, if you prefer to make a second partition in the spare space) your partition, and sorting out the boot sector, and everything. Used it several times to do just this
Ooh I've been looking forever for a USB stick boot app which will work with my USB sticks (none of the other ones out there do) and the one that CloneZilla publishes works great!! *bins old CloneZilla CD and updates to latest USB ver* Lovely jubbly
Well, I had my fair share of problems. Firstly everything went fine using cloneZilla, however after checking my partition sizes it had clones them exactly the same. Windows being windows it does not allow you to re-size the system partition. Out comes gparted, lovely little tool - however I was told stage 1 of 3 would take 8 hours, when it only took 2 hours to copy the whole drive-to-drive. I remembered in cloneZilla that there was a "expert" option that I had decided to avoid. A little reading up showed me i should have used the -r and -k1 switches. So thats what i did. After it finished vista had become corrupt (normal behaviour after re-sizing the system partition) and I had to do a repair with the vista install cd. Im still yet to figure out which hard drive my os is running off!
acronis true image home 2009 pro does usb sticks.. ghost you have to pull trick or 2 but that can be booted off usb as well.. I used clonezilla live and it's very straitforward but at the same time, limited.. like with true image I can backup all the drives with incremental backups (so one a month on all rigs at a scheduled time is possible at 1am sundays)- then if I ever need to go back a couple of months.. I have a history of backups and not stuck with my most recent one.. and incremental backups are fast as it doesn't have to re-image the whole partition, just changes since the original systembackup, plus you can verify your backups afterwards I like clonezilla as it's simple but acronis does have a clone disk that automatically re-sizes existing parititions to fit the target disk and made bootable.. only downside is it's not free (to the layman)
