moving boot partition to new drive

[Dorkenstein]

I am getting a new hard drive to boot Vista off of, but I need to know of the best way to move only the boot partition of my old drive, which has several partitions on it, transferred to the new blank 300gb drive. The trick is, I want to keep the same partition size and use the rest of the new blank drive for apps.

So the current drive looks like:

50gb OS partition / 250gb app partition / 350gb storage partition

I need the new blank 300 gb drive to contain the 50gb partition for OS, but keep the rest open for games/apps.

Is there free software that can pull that off without errors? Thanks.

 

[darkenedsoul]

I use Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1 to image my systems. Two are XP (desktop/laptop) and other desktop is XP/Vista 64 Ultimate. I'd image the entire drive and format new one then do the restore to it of the image and you should be all set. Not sure what there is for free software. Check over at www.download.com for program of that type. That's all I can recommend or spend $50-80 for Acronis (I had to get an updated ISO image to handle RAID (intel on mobo) in order to be able to boot from disc and do backup/restore).

Mike

 

[Dorkenstein]

You mean image just my boot partition or the entire physical drive? Because the entire physical drive won't fit, one drive is almost 700 gb and one is only 300 gb.

 

[darkenedsoul]

You need to have an external USB/Firewire/eSata drive to do this. Image entire main drive that has all the partitions to an external drive that the program you use will be able to see, i.e. it can see the drives during boot up to get to backup/restore of the drive. Drives are cheap enough, get a 750Gb and an external enclosure (I prefer ones with fans myself) and backup to it (use compression/high priority) and then restore from it. But make sure that this works on another system before doing it to this one if you can, just to cover all bases! It would suck that you go through all this and can't restore from the external drive due to program limitations. That's why I prefer a commercial product. Don't get me wrong, I support (when I can) shareware products.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Well that's mildly disappointing. I wasn't prepared to buy another new hard drive already.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Any second opinions or am I stuck?

 

[Dorkenstein]

One more bump, new drive will be here soon.

 

[HendraU]

Partition Saving (http://damien.guibouret.free.fr/en/index_frame.html) may be a good free option. I personally use Symantec Ghost (DOS version), which is easy and fast, but have used Partition Saving for recovery/file extraction purposes.
I'm sure there are other cloning progs out there, but these 2 are what I've used and am recommending. Good luck.

 

[psihog]

I'm doing the same thing for one of my systems now. I also use Acronis. You can use the 15-day trial if you don't want to buy it, but it's good prog for regular backup.

-You just need to backup the 50GB boot partition. Acronis will let you choose which partition you want to back up, don't need to clone whole drive. It'll probably be compressed to ~30GB. save the backup on your 350GB storage partition.
-Then make an Acronis boot CD.
-Install the new HDD into your system.
-Boot from Acronis boot CD, and restore the boot partition backup file from your storage partition and select the new drive as destination. -It'll ask you what size u want for the new partition. I think you can go bigger, not smaller.
-That's it, you can remove the old drive and see if new drive will boot like before...
-if new boot partition works, add the old HDD back.. you may need to switch the SATA/IDE for those 2 drive so the new HDD will boot first.. Or you can select boot device from BIOS or seomthing. also probably need to make sure your Apps partition gets correct drive letter,, etc.. you should be able to figure that out after it boots.

 

[darkenedsoul]

Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
Well that's mildly disappointing. I wasn't prepared to buy another new hard drive already.

Well, if you're thinking of doing something like that you should have an external drive or another internal drive that you can image to. Internal would be faster but you need enough space to save the image to as well as be able to access it to restore from. Problems with that are drive lettering, but that's another situation. As was explained prior to this reply there are other backup/restore options, you just need to check for them to see what works best in your budget. I'm using 2 external 500's for my 2 desktops and I need a bigger drive to save more than 3 backups at this point (dual boot XP Pro SP3 and Vista Ultimate 64 which is >100Gb per backup/image (it's my DAW system)) and a 320Gb for my laptop (it's backup is ~100Gb too and is my portable DAW system when I run it/use it.

But you should think about external storage for saving off images, you only need to hook it up when you doing the backup, then disconnect via usb control panel and unplug/put away till needed. Think towards the future, if you need only 200Gb to save a few image backups get a 500Gb, etc...I wish I had gone the 750/1TB personally on one of those externals!

 

[Dorkenstein]

I have a 250gb external, I just wasn't ready to plunk down more cash for a larger one after buying a new boot drive.

 

[darkenedsoul]

Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
I have a 250gb external, I just wasn't ready to plunk down more cash for a larger one after buying a new boot drive.

Depending on how large your main C drive is used (how much space taken up) you may be able to use the 250Gb if it's external for the time being.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

A lot of imaging programs can do it on the fly and won't require extra storage to save the image file. I know Ghost is capable of this for sure, and I believe Partition Magic is also, but I haven't used either in a couple years so my memory may be faulty.