Is Win7 installation affected by...

italiano121 · 20 Aug 2010

Howdy folks:

Please help me with a question about my Dell Win7 Premium laptop.
A)Would the following scenario affect my windows installation ?
1. Taking out my hard drive and enclosing in USB HD enclosure.
2. Connecting via USB to identical laptop.
3. I assume HD will be assigned a drive letter.
4. Making an emergency backup of my hard drive by just pasting and copying from the now
external USB HD to a folder in the other identical system.
5. Putting hard drive back in my laptop.
B) Would the drive take on the C: drive letter again when I put it back?
C)Will it boot ok when I put it back?
Thank You All

Petey7 · 20 Aug 2010

It will not effect your drive in the slightest, but I doubt that that method would actually make a usable backup of your computer. That is why people us imaging software to make backups. A better idea would be to put the other hard drive in the enclosure, create a folder, and use Windows 7 backup to create an image of your hard disk in that folder on the other drive.

whs · 20 Aug 2010

Copy/Paste will do nothing for you. Do as Petey says and make an image - e.g. with this: Imaging with free Macrium

Petey7 · 20 Aug 2010

Free Macrium is suggested by many, so you might want to do that rather than Windows built in backup software.

madtownidiot · 20 Aug 2010

Unfortunately, you have to have at least the professional version of windows 7 in order to use the windows image backup, which works very well for what you're trying to accomplish. The method you asked about in your first post would work for backing up your files but you wouldn't be able to recover your system by copying everything back to your HDD. Unless you used imaging software like ghost or acronis, you won't be able to make a backup than you can copy to a HDD and make it bootable.

DeaconFrost · 20 Aug 2010

Yeah, what you are trying to do is like re-engineering lettuce just to make salad. Why mess around with a process that involves a lot of manual work, and won't be successful anyway, when you can just use a free imaging tool, like Macrium? It's free, simple, and designed for this purpose. It can even be scheduled.

Petey7 · 20 Aug 2010

madtownidiot said:

Unfortunately, you have to have at least the professional version of windows 7 in order to use the windows image backup, which works very well for what you're trying to accomplish.

Actually, you can use Windows Image back-up with any version of 7, you just can't back-up to a network device.

Source: Windows 7 editions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FliGi7 · 20 Aug 2010

If you are set on taking the drive out and mounting it to another laptop, I suggest the following:

dcfldd

Straight forward, bit for bit copy of the whole drive. It doesn't get simpler than that.

madtownidiot · 20 Aug 2010

Petey7 said:

madtownidiot said:

Unfortunately, you have to have at least the professional version of windows 7 in order to use the windows image backup, which works very well for what you're trying to accomplish.

Actually, you can use Windows Image back-up with any version of 7, you just can't back-up to a network device.

Source: Windows 7 editions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

my fault... wasn't reading it right... Which one is right for you? - Microsoft Windows

Petey7 · 20 Aug 2010

madtownidiot said:

my fault... wasn't reading it right... Which one is right for you? - Microsoft Windows

If it wasn't for my mom having home premium, I would have thought the same thing (and did until I saw she had it).