Trying to clone VAIO install from original HD to new, different HD.

[SteveTheHealer]

Hi folks,
I have a Sony VAIO running Win7HomePremium on 5400rpm Toshiba MK5065GSX (non-AF).
It had some read errors in paging file and elsewhere, superslow running, and I wanted to do
- repair/flag bad sectors with CHKDSK, and then
- clone all partitions to 7200rpm WD Scorpio WD5000BEKT (non-AF) to improve performance.

Chkdsk replaced clusters here and there ok, FarStone DriveCopy duplicated drive ok, but when I put the new drive into the machine it complained the boot object can't be found and a hardware change could be responsible. Left me with only Sony factory restore interface to play with. Seemed legit ...

So I used the Factory Restore facility to make a fresh Win7 on new drive, which worked ok as expected.
Then I used DriveCopy to copy over the C: partition only from the original drive to bring my user+data in, but this does not work out ok ... on new drive I get a login screen but user won't stay logged in, and admin ends up with a blank, pale blue desktop and a tiny message Copy of Windows Invalid.

Have swum out of my depth here, prior experience of successful drive clone upgrades has been Vista or XP systems. I reason that instead of bringing old C partition over separately I need to clone entire drive and then configure the EFI Boot process to look for the new drive hardware, using BCDEdit.

I am technical-ish but no experience of BCDedit tool. Don't have program BCDEdit accessible without it booting up, wary of editing original BCD data on old drive (!) and I'm having difficulty figuring out how to go about this without a running system.

I do not have the Official Sony OEM DVD for the system, it's second hand, but I do have a Win7 install DVD intended for upgrades from Vista. I do have legit Windows on the 5400rpm drive, and its serial is on machine label for validation purposes.

Will I need to find something to run up Windows PE, or some other stripped down version, so I can access tools to configure the boot? How will I find out the identifier for the new hard drive to plumb that into the boot? I am loathe to rebuild user up from scratch but would resort to that if I can't succeed otherwise, preferring to try to break new ground and learn stuff first. Sometimes friends ask me to do upgrades like this and it would be useful to know how 'post-Vista'.

Thanks for reading my plea.
(~*~)

 

[fireberd]

Cloning drives is hit or miss. One of our forum software guru's did some in-depth testing of cloning programs in both Win 7 and Linux and the conclusion was it works for some and not others.

On the other hand, using a disc image (backup) program such as Macrium Reflect (even the free version) works every time. My suggestion, if the original disc is still in tact is to use Macrium Reflect and make a full disc image to a separate drive. Then "restore" the image to the new drive.

Macrium Software | Your Image is Everything

 

[samuria]

You never clone from a disk that's faulty with bad blocks as it will copy bad blocks to the new drive also you don't know the state of files your copying a clean install is the only option

 

[SteveTheHealer]

Thankyou, fireberd, I will try the Macrium software, nothing to lose.

Thankyou, samuria, for your advice.
I know which files were damaged and 'repaired' - the only one I would depend upon is the paging file which I can easily reallocate on the new drive. The others were a mix of assembly source files, temp files, and two dlls which I can recreate anew from another fresh install I made. I have already reallocated the bad sectors on the physical drive to its 'spares' list, my only issue was mismatching on the boot object IDs.

 

[mjf]

- the only one I would depend upon is the paging file which I can easily reallocate on the new drive.

When Macrium is set (by default) to an intelligent sector copy the contents of pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys are excluded from the image.

 

[SteveTheHealer]

Excluding page and hibernate content is very sensible.

 

[mjf]

Excluding page and hibernate content is very sensible.

Off course it is which is why your earlier comment was a little confusing. (depend upon the paging file...)

 

[SteveTheHealer]

I meant that no damaged files would prevent initial operation after the clone, except a damaged page file, which might but which I could fix. Sometimes the damaged files are required to boot, which can be troublesome. No worries.