Copying OS to another drive? nOOb style question :)

[smarteyeball]

I'm being a little lazy and I know the answer already, but I'm asking anyway in the vain hope.....

One of my HDD's is failing quickly and I 'suspect' that it's the current drive that the beta is installed on (although I'm still not certain) and rather than go through all the nuisance of partitioning / installing on another drive, is there a way to copy the current install (6801) holus bolus to another drive and repair / modify the boot records / registry to make it function?

Alternatively, could I make a bootable image and use that to re-install on a new drive? I've never created an 'image' so that's new territory for me.

As I said, I doubt it's possible but as I've already spent days 'setting up' 6801, I really don't feel like doing it all again so soon, but the way my rigs been acting up, I may not have a choice.

(I've already installed a total of 5 fresh installations in the last couple of days and it's getting time consuming and tiresome)

 

[NormCameron]

Yes. I use Acronis True Image. The only problem I have encountered have been with using the Drive copy from within Vista. It doesn't seem to work on the Boot Drive. But will mirror image any other drive. To get around this I dual boot XP on a different drive. I am sure there are other Diskcopy programs out there that work equally as well. On Xp I used to have a utility provided by Seagate that worked a treat.

 

[smarteyeball]

Thanks Norm. I'll have a play with Acronis 11 tomorrow. I'm royally fed up with this PC at the moment.

 

[linuzo]

Yeah, or if you just use the Vista one and copy the image, it will copy everything except the bootloader. So then you could run the Windows 7 install disk and do a master boot record repair. I have not tested this step with Win7 but it was attainable with Vista. Just to throw that in the air if you do not have access to XP on that machine.

 

[smarteyeball]

Thanks Linuzo, I'll have a look at that as well. I feel like a noob for not even opening that feature, let alone using it

Just curious, what help would XP be in this case? I've got a copy floating around.

EDIT:

I've just used the backup tool from within 7 and it backed up fine, but won't let me create a recovery disc. I get a 'the parameter is incorrect' message. I'll try it from within Vista tmw.

However it may all be for naught because the HDD I was going to copy the installation too may actually be the faulty drive

At least I've learned something new today and that's never a waste