Safest Way to Clone Windows 7 Volume for Dual Booting

Night Hawk · 22 Oct 2010

mjf said:

Night Hawk said:

The BCD store on any Vista or 7 machine is the actual boot configuration for the one or more OSs installed unless opting to add on another type of boot loader as with Windows/Linux or other OSs involved. A program like EasyBCD is the graphical gui type BCD editing program that will see drive letters used there while behind the scenes the BCD store itself is still looking hardware.

Note even when looking in the boot.ini file for XP you will see the same reference to device not logical drive letter there seeing the typical "rdisk(0 or 1 or 2)partition 1 or 2 or 3 or 4" depending on how many drives and partitions are present as far as which drive and primary the older version was installed onto.

As for selecting a drive or device when pressing the designated F key to bring up a boot device menu you will see the drive models under the particular catagory of drive or device selected being shown there. If you have two hard drives one WD and a Seagate you see WD model number or Seagate model number as the two options not whether they are C, D, E, F, etc..

Is this an attempt at humor?

First you have to know the difference between bios, mbr, and boot loader being three totally different things to start with. The bios looks for the mbr on whichever drive it comes to first that has entries present or you end up only seeing a small dash blinking on the upper left corner of the screen not having found any OS.

From there the mbr points to the boot loader and the entries in that for the drive and partition as well as the OS installed. It's when you first get into a BCD edit you start seeing "C:" or any other drive letter while in a command prompt. BCDEDIT - How to Use

Note this is also the case when booted live from a 7 install dvd or repair cd made up since you are still using the software method.

mjf · 22 Oct 2010

Night Hawk

It is humor!!! I tried to explain this to you a few days ago - post 65

What's on that 100MB partition? Can I delete it? (

1 2 3 ... Last Page)

"POST 65"
Hopefully the full Picture I'm confident that what I said earlier is correct except I left out one element of the picture and that is the Partition Boot Record which I believe is the first 16 sectors of the active partition. So the MBR passes control to the PBR which loads the boot manager on it's partition and so on.
So the boot sequence is:

BIOS --> MBR (inc partition table) at start of disk --> [ PBR (at start of active partition) --> Boot Manager (Using BCD) ] --> C:\windows\system32\winload.exe

[....] Key elements of 100MB system reserved for booting

Again here is the Hex of the MBR and the Hex of the first part of the PBR.
To get the PBR Hex I mounted a macrium image of the 100MB system reserved and opened it with a Hex editor.

Attached Thumbnails

gregrocker · 22 Oct 2010

Can I borrow your hex editor for Halloween?

Night Hawk · 23 Oct 2010

I wonder if you can set that up in a dual boot?!

mjf · 23 Oct 2010

Night Hawk said:

I wonder if you can set that up in a dual boot?!

If only you could keep your confused, ramblings as brief as this one.

Bare Foot Kid · 23 Oct 2010

mjf said:

Night Hawk said:

I wonder if you can set that up in a dual boot?!

If only you could keep your confused, ramblings as brief as this one.

Night Hawk · 23 Oct 2010

Hey Trailerman I hope you're still with us! This went way offtrack here!

We're still waiting to hear how you made out.

Trailerman · 25 Oct 2010

Sorry guys - was away for a few days.

The more I read, the more terrified I become about trying this at all - once bitten twice shy I guess.

I don't mind using a BIOS switch to choose boot drive (the system in question is a Dell - so F12), but I don't have clean drives to work with. Because I'm now booting using a clone (on an otherwise clean drive) of an original which then refused to boot, I somehow need to try and find a way to reclone my clone back over my currupted original, which shares a drive with 2 other partitions (both of which I need to keep).

I do also have a 3rd drive in the system, which I can use to create a backup image to restore from, but I'm concerned about some suggestions that the only safe way to do this is to clone onto a clean (and preferably identical) drive.

I will try and wade through the extensive set of posts above and hope I've understood everything before I embark.

Jules

gregrocker · 25 Oct 2010

Plug back in the source HD alone, set as first HD to boot in BIOS. If it won't start any longer, then boot the Win7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD, click through to Recovery Tools list to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots until Win7 starts. Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

If it fails, make sure Win7 partition is marked Active and run Startup Repair again x3: Partition - Mark as Active

Once it starts, you can plug the other HD's back in, set the preferred one as first HD to boot, then boot the other one using one-time BIOS boot menu key given on first screen, in setup literature, or in your Manual which can be read on the Support Downloads webpage for your computer or mobo.

GeneO · 25 Oct 2010

Here is a link I found useful. The did not do advice for a generalized BCD before cloning, but did afterward and it does work.

Multibooters, Vista Dual and Multibooting - Cloning Vista

I also wonder if having a separate system and boot partition make a difference (i.e. installing windows 7 on an existing partition where boot and system are the same vs. reformatting and letting windows 7 install create a separate 100MB system partition and boot partition). I have the system=boot.

- Gene