Is there a way to image windows 7?

[Red Squirrel]

Last time I dealt with anything to do with partitions involving windows 7 I found out it is VERY fussy, and you can't just resize or move a windows 7 partition or it breaks everything. There's usually some kind of system partition too and I think that's the one that's the culpit, it's very fussy as to where that partition physically is on the disk.

I have two SSDs, one with Linux, one with Windows. I want to swap the OSes. Linux is easy, I can just image it then restore the image to the other disk, done. But how do I do 7? If I just make an image than try to restore it I can almost guarantee it wont boot because it will see that I messed with the partitioning. Is using dd the only way to do it for 7?

 

[saratoga172]

We do it all the time at work. We use acronis true to image and copy to new drives. It does a pretty good job about different size disks. You may also be able to create a vhd but I've only just started playing around with that. There are some other software that work but acronis is solid for me.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Acronis is what I'm using. I used gparted before just to resize a partition and all hell broke loose. So I guess as long as I keep it the same size I should be ok? I have never been successful it doing anything related to partitions involving windows 7. It refuses to boot after.

 

[saratoga172]

I've taken different sized hard drive images and placed them on smaller hard drives as long as I've had enough headroom. For example we used to image a bunch of mechanical drives before moving to SSD and the images with OS and software were about 35-40gb. This was on a 250gb mechanical drive. We purchased and went to 128gb SSD's and I was able to install without issues. But I had plenty of headroom. Just remember to get drivers and change any bios settings.

I try to avoid actually resizing partitions if I can help it because it rarely works well. Increasing is no problem but decreasing is awful and a pain. Acronis uses a bare metal backup/restore feature in some newer versions so you may need 2012 or 2013 to do the large drive to smaller drive. Also not sure on the overhead required as far as space.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Did it and it worked! I guess I was just paranoid because of my past experience trying to resize/move the partition, but this was just a direct copy so all was fine. I also swapped the hard drive cables around so that it would be in the proper order in the grub boot menu and all is good. My Linux and Windows systems both work and are on the oposite drives now. (just did a swap).

 

[jhansman]

Ditto for Acronis. Best $30 I've spent in years. Just be sure to make bootable recovery media (CD, flash drive, whatever) and test it if your backup image is on an external drive.

 

[ralfy]

Is this issue connected to restoring to dissimilar hardware or a new PC?

 

[raf051888]

Clonezilla can do this also and is free. If you are expanding the partition then you'll need to do that separately. I recently just did this myself, and expanded the partition with a GParted Live USB.

 

[ichie]

My backup tool is aomei backupper, a freeware with powerful function, I think.
Partition tool is partition assistant.

 

[powerhouse65]

As long as the target drive is the same size or larger, I use dd. It's always worked for me, even when other more fancy tools have failed.
I even use dd with pigz to back up my machine locally (using LVM for everything except /boot).
By the way, if you dual-boot but use mostly Linux, you might be able to run Windows on KVM or a Xen hypervisor with VGA passthrough - it beats everything I've ever seen and tried. If interested, have a look here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=112013.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Lot of stuff like games need native environment. Even basic games wont even launch in a VM because the virtual video card is usually sub par so the game will refuse to run. So the dual boot works better.

Acronis turned out to work fine though. I imaged both drives to a .tib on my network, then I just swapped the drive cables (so the order remains proper) cleared the partition table then reimaged the drives.