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How to make Win7 run on new partition on newly cloned Drive?
Have a dual boot XP/Win7. XP is on C: (FAT32) and Win7 on D: (NTFS, 1st extended partition) with several storage partitons on a 1TB drive. I back up partitions using Acronis. Recently I needed to move over to another 1TB drive. Same size disk, same size partitions. I cloned the whole Disk. Everything copied, but of course Win7 won't work. It finds it, boots, loads, logs in and then logs out again. Now I have redone this so many times trying to test variables, that I have partitioned the drives using Win7 (ie 3 primaries) and cloned that (this is just a secondary issue, but I thought to mention it, I am trying to see what this 3 primary partitions is all about (may come in handy, but one must first master handling and setting boot partitions. So back to my original issue...! I cloned the exact same Win7 partitioned drives (ie. 3 primaries) and the clone will still not boot on D: (just to make sure that wasn't an issue...)
I started reading up on the whole Win7 boot loading issue, came across "Easy" BCD and learning about MS's new Win7 boot loading technology Apparently the issue is that MS BCD now keeps track of an unique identifier number of the target partition?. And by some strange weirdness, Easy BCD decided to NOT make this as straight forward a process as I would like to see, given what a complete stopper this is.???
It will find the BCD, open it, add and remove entries and conveniently overlook this identifier!!!?? (why do I feel they are just trying to sell us the Recovery CDs?) Anyhow I DID buy the Win7 Recovery CD. And ironically it will remove the boot loader completely and revert me back to the original ntldr config. Which is fine as that gets me back into XP and EasyBCD to try all over again... Well a WEEEEEK later, I have tried playing with dummy images of Win7 and tried various work arounds but nothing but an originally installed Win7 OS will take. This SHOULD'NT BE... This defeats the whole purpose of backing up OS images and makes it impossible to transfer to new drives!
I know EasyBCD says it CAN do it.... But CONSIDERING what a fundamental setback to OS back up and re-installation this issue is (setting us back 20 years imo) ...this part of the instructions is AMAZINGLY vague, with grammatical typos, so I am not sure what exactly they are getting at, but it seems they want you to transfer BCDs immediately after cloning, while both HDDs are physically present, and while you are still in the original OS?? (could they make it any more technically limiting???)
Is that the only solution? So the Big Question: Is there a way to take a complete OS image of Win7 that wants to be on D: and put it on another drive and fix that damned identifier after the fact or not....???? So the OS doesn't log in and log out (Isn't MS taking that a bit far?) cause I am going nuts over here... I feel like the novice I was 10 years ago, trying to figure out how to install CD drivers in DOS!
Is there a better tool out there that does a better job then "EasyBCD"? at configuring the BCD to accept the partitions by also addressing this unique identifier issue? That would be the miracle I am hoping for... btw will trade this copy of this very interesting Win7 Recovery software for assistance thanks...
Last edited by sigma6; 09 Apr 2013 at 05:52. Reason: grammar correction, emphasis