Solved How do I swap to a larger HD and move the System Reserved partition

[etcetera]

Hi - hope this is the right forum.

I have a Windows 7 system with two drives. Disk 0 has a System Reserved partition and the I: volume. Disk 1 has the boot partition and most of the OS software on the C: volume.

I would like to swap out Disk 0 with a larger drive and move the I: volume to it (keeping the I: letter). I don't care which drive has the System Reserved partition.

Ideally this would be as painless as possible so I'm willing to pay for software to do this if necessary.

Thanks for any help!

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Normally, you'd want system reserved and C on the same drive.

If you have them on separate drives, like you do now, you can't boot your PC if disk 0 is disconnected or fails.

You don't need a system reserved partition, but you DO need the files it contains.

In your shoes, I would:

1: copy the system reserved files to C using EasyBCD

2: Disconnect disk 0 and confirm that your PC can then boot from C alone (disk 1).

3: Reconnect disk 0 and the use an application like Macrium Reflect Free Edition to make an image of the I partition. Save that image file on some external drive.

4: Remove disk 0 and replace it with the new drive.

5: Restore the image of I to the new drive using Macrium.


If the I partition contains ONLY data files, not programs, you wouldn't need to use Macrium. You could just copy whatever is on I to an external using the mouse and then copy that stuff back to the new replacement drive.

 

[whs]

Here is how you get your bootmgr on C. Then you can forget about the system reserved.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/209885-bootmgr-move-c-easybcd.html