Clone and Backup Problems

Hi
This is a bit complicated but let me give it a shot. I have 2 HDs in my PC and a few external USB drives. What I did was I was having problems with the C drive OS (windows 7 Prem), I moved the C drive and made it the D Drive. I got another HD made it the C Drive and installed a new OS windows 7 Pro. Everything was running fine then one day when I booted and I got the option of which OS would I like to load. I'd pick the win7 Pro and everything would work fine. It was when I wanted to upgrade the C HD (running out of space) to a larger HD. I bought Macrium Reflect 5.3 with the intention to clone my disk. This is where the problems stated. I noticed that the size of the disk I was cloning the C drive was 465 gigs, after cloning to the new disk that disk was only 440 gigs. The cloned disk would-not boot. I've done this more times than I can count? What could be the problem?
Is it possible to make a backup of my drivers, programs, registry, then install windows 7 on a new HD then install the backups that I made and have the disk be returned to its original state.
Thanks
Bill

Post a screen shot of Windows Disk Management so we can visualize what is going on.

Disk 0 is the D Drive
Disk 2 is the C Drive

You have C on one drive (disc 1) and your boot files on another (disk 0). Specifically, the boot files are in that small 100 MB first partition on disc 0, as indicated by the term "system" shown for that partition in your post 4.

Most likely that happened because at some point you installed Window with more than 1 hard drive connected. Bad form. Install Windows with only 1 drive connected.

As it sits now, if you disconnected disc 0, the PC could not boot from the C partition on disc 1 because the necessary boot files would be on the disconnected disc 0.

Likewise, any clone of disk 1 is not going to boot--for the same reason. Disk 1 has no boot files and therefore its clone will not have any boot files and won't be bootable.

You could try a couple of things. Disconnect all of your external drives before beginning.

1: use EasyBCD to copy your boot files from that small partition on disc 0 to the C partition on disc 1. If you did that, disc 1 would then be bootable on its own, even with disc 0 disconnected. You would need to also mark the C drive as "active" and the 100 MB partition as inactive through Window Disk Management. If this method succeeds, you could delete that small 100 MB partition.

2: disconnect disc 0 and then run Windows startup repair several times, in an attempt to force startup repair to put boot files on the C partition on the remaining disc 1. As in the first method, make sure that C is then marked active and the small 100 MB partition is marked inactive.

I'd probably try the first method.

Here's a tutorial for it:

Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD

When done, confirm that you can boot and operate normally with disc 0 disconnected.

If it works, then re-try your clone. If the clone fails, consider imaging with Macrium instead of cloning.

As an aside, what's the point of the E "Image" partition?

ignatzatsonic said:

As an aside, what's the point of the E "Image" partition?

Your question made me curious. Do branded PCs have a factory reset partition like laptops usually have? The size of E is similar to what we see in laptop restore partitions.

What do you think?

GokAy said:

ignatzatsonic said:

As an aside, what's the point of the E "Image" partition?

Your question made me curious. Do branded PCs have a factory reset partition like laptops usually have? The size of E is similar to what we see in laptop restore partitions.

What do you think?

I think branded PCs do often have a factory reset partition, but I wouldn't expect it to be named "image". I suspect this image partition was made by the owner.

Ignatzatsonic thanks for your reply, it makes senses, I'll will try your suggestion tonight and hopefully will be able to report success. One thing I did want to add is Disk 0 the D drive has a HP win 7 prem, OS on it, I believe the E Partition is backup files HP supplies for there software. I myself didn't make any of those partitions that I might be aware of but at the time if I did a backup of the HP files it could have made that partition with out me knowing it . The C Drive Disk 1 has a Microsoft OS win pro on it.
Will post tomorrow
Thanks again
Bill