Moving Win7 Partition to Another Drive

I have a slightly different suggestion. Assuming you have the Windows7 installation disk, why don't you install it independently of XP on one of your physical drives that does not have XP on it. Just disconnect the XP drive and install Win7. Then you can switch between the systems with the BIOS boot sequence. You may still have to fix the bootrecord on the XP partition though after you deleted your current win7.
I have that setup with Vista and win7. The big advantage is that you can manipulate (e.g. delete) one system completely independent of the other without effecting the one you want to retain.
In addition I setup a seperate data partition and share the data between both system - never need to sync my data. Best is to do it from the XP side and then just include those folders into the win7 library.

Thanks for the reminder, whs. I normally will try to suggest this with multiple HD's and have convinced quite a few. Tracey pretty much had in mind what she wanted, but I should have tried to persuade her otherwise.

From now on, separate OS hardrives is all I"m gonna recommend when available. All of this can be avoided then, and the drives can come and go as you please.

gregrocker said:

Thanks for the reminder, whs. I normally will try to suggest this with multiple HD's and have convinced quite a few. Tracey pretty much had in mind what she wanted, but I should have tried to persuade her otherwise.

From now on, separate OS hardrives is all I"m gonna recommend when available. All of this can be avoided then, and the drives can come and go as you please.

Hi Greg, you are right. It is so much cleaner. I hate those double and triple boot messes. If the OP does not have an installation disk, it would be a little more difficult because then she'd have to do cloning.
Interestingly enough, one of my SSDs came with a USB stick that had Acronis on it for cloning the system and moving it to the SSD - very handy.

whs said:

Interestingly enough, one of my SSDs came with a USB stick that had Acronis on it for cloning the system and moving it to the SSD - very handy.

Those SSD's ought to come with a Acronis stick for what they cost!

Now if you use that Acronis to copy or clone to another drive, can you count on MBR being intact on the target drive?

gregrocker said:

whs said:

Interestingly enough, one of my SSDs came with a USB stick that had Acronis on it for cloning the system and moving it to the SSD - very handy.

Those SSD's ought to come with a Acronis stick for what they cost!

Now if you use that Acronis to copy or clone to another drive, can you count on MBR being intact on the target drive?

I did not have to use it because I had an installation disk. But I once tried that with my Norton Ghost 14 and it actually did not work even though I specified to move the MBR. Even the Symantec people could not figure out why.

traceyw said:

I have an old DOS version of Ghost on a boot CD and can readily back up the current Win7 partition ready for recovering to the prepared partition on my main drive.

Hi traceyw

I'm hoping to use the Boot CD version of Ghost with Win7 too... please clarify; have you actually been using it to successfully create AND RESTORE Win7 partition images (and if so were they NTFS formatted by Win7 or pre-formatted in NTFS using something like Partition Magic)?

Thanks

~M

Hi ma5k

Never really thought about how they were created. Essentially I suppose they are DOS disks since, as I said in one of my earlier posts, I like to be prepared for emergencies and this has proved to be of value as recently as yesterday when I lost everything.

What I did to create the CD was to create a bootable floppy based on the ME bootable floppy and get this working exactly as I wanted but before burning the CD using Nero I added various program files to the compilation.

Once I'd got what I wanted, I burned the CD so now when I want use Ghost to do a backup, I boot my PC using the CD, change to the drive the CD is on and change to the ghost directory and run it. Simple as that. I might add that my version of Ghost is Ghost 2003, an old version yes, but just because its old doesn't mean it won't work. It does an admirable job and I use since it is so much quicker in restoring an image than TrueImage9 (again another old version program but which is my preferred imaging program). Once when I restored an image with TrueImage it took around 45 minutes to an hour, Ghost takes perhaps 5 minutes.

I should also add that even though Ghost is running in DOS, it still recognises NTFS partitions without a problem, backs 'em up and restores 'em as well - at least Ghost 2003 does but don't know about later versions. Be aware though that you will need to be comfortable with using the command line although that is simple enough as they're only basic DOS commands.

Hope this helps.

Tracey

Thanks for the reply Tracy...

Sorry if my post wasn't clear - I'm familiar with Ghost 2003 running from a boot disk as I have been using it myself. It's actually the last version of Ghost that works in this way (outside the installed OS), which is my main reason for wanting to stick with it.

My question was whether they've changed anything in the way Win7 formats NTFS that Ghost wouldn't be compatible with (I'm also wondering whether Win7 will suffer limitations if I install on a pre-formatted legacy NTFS partition). Don't worry if you don't know such things, but you can probably still help by confirming your own experience...

traceyw said:

Hi ma5k

and this has proved to be of value as recently as yesterday when I lost everything.

...so was this with a Win7 partition (& you've presumably had no probs)?

also, did you create an NTFS partition to install Win7 onto, or let Win7 format the partition itself during the install?

Hope I've clarified things & thanks again for your help

~M

Hi ma5k

Sorry if I misunderstood your question.

To be honest I never really thought about the deeper things in using Ghost. I already had a pre-prepared CD before moving to a dual-boot system with Win7 and I just tried it. It didn't surpise me when it worked perfectly.

As far the formatting of an NTFS partition is concerned it would appear that Win7 just creates/formats a standard NTFS partition - nothing different about it as far as I am aware. Certainly Ghost does not reject it. If you have any doubts about it I would suggest you try Ghost anyway and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work and you've got to find a work-around. From my experience though I doubt you'll have any problems.

My problem was caused simply by wiping out the original Win7 partition after copying the files to another partition. Problem was that I had not told the system where it could find the Win7 partition so I finished up unable to load anything. It had nothing to do with Ghost at all since it has performed faultlessly in anything I've asked it to do - and I'll continue to use it in the way I have for the last five/six years or so.

When I installed Win7 I pre-prepared a formatted NTFS partition using Acronis Disk Director 10. In my reading on this forum I understand that if you let Win7 create the partition, it'll also create a small 100Mb partition for boot files etc. By pre-partitioning your drive, I understand that the boot files are placed in the directory structure of the new Win7 partition, or, if you have a dual boot system, in the partition of the earlier Win version you already have installed - in my case WinXP. However, from my experience, BOOTMGR is placed on the Win7 partition hence the problem I had in that by wiping out the Win7 partition after copying the files to another partition, BOOTMGR could not be found since I had not told it where BOOTMGR was to be found. This landed me with hell and all trouble trying to recover sufficiently to get just WinXP running again.

I HOPE this answers your question but sorry if it doesn't.

Tracey

Thanks for the helpful reply

traceyw said:

If you have any doubts about it I would suggest you try Ghost anyway and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work and you've got to find a work-around. From my experience though I doubt you'll have any problems.

Sadly it didn't work, but I think the issue was to do with the hardware (possibly an incompatibility with the m/board SATA controller) rather than Win7. Incidentally Partition Magic freaked out too which is a total unknown for me after 100% reliability using this combination (with Ghost) on literally hundreds of systems over the years.

I used Partition Wizard & Acronis True Image as an alternative (from a boot CD as I'm a great believer in 'imaging' from outside the OS to ensure integrity, particularly in respect of restoring without potential virus issues). The pre-Norton Ghost (2003/v8) was always totally reliable, efficient (small image files) and very quick and it's a real shame to have to 'take a step backwards' to move on. Although Acronis has a prettier GUI, it isn't as elegant/straightforward in use, requiring more care with settings. It's slower than Ghost, but not painfully so. On the upside, file size has improved significantly and is now comparable. All in all a satisfactory way forward, but no real match for the old Ghost!

Long may it continue to work for you!

~M