Question about cloning bootable hard drives?

T

thoudini

New Member
When upgrading hard drive, how to I clone the drives to make a bootable exact copy of my old hard drive?​

Basically, I just bought this new hard drive that's of a bigger capacity, to replace my old one in my laptop.



Once I cloned my old hard drive onto my new one using 'Clonezilla', all my files went on the new hard drive successfully but once I plugged it in; I realised the hard drive wasn't bootable as there was no operating system on it. The computer told me to insert the Windows 7 Home Premium CD.

Is there any way I could repeat the cloning process with a program that allows the new hard drive to be bootable too? Because I think I'm going to have to resort to pirating a Windows 7 ISO and then using my product key for it (which isn't illegal, as I have my licensed product key, right?).


I'm new here, but have fairly decent computer knowledge so say all that you want.

Thanks
 
I regularly use HDClone to move my laptop drive to a larger one.

The free version is slow as hell (120GB takes 8.5 hrs), but it copies the contents bit for bit and therefore the computer boots right up with the new drive.
 
Hard drive manufacturers provide software you can use to clone it.

Western Digital has a good one powered by Acronis. Not sure if you can use it on non-WD drives though.
 
Heck, Win 7 has the ability to do this built-in. You can create a system image and a system repair disk. Swap out the old HDD with the new. Boot from system repair disk, restore image. Voila! New, bootable HDD complete with OS and all files.
 
Thanks guys I managed to boot with my new hard drive by inserting a new Windows 7 CD at boot (it wouldn't let me do anything at all otherwise). Had a completely new OS with my 'Windows.old' folder with all my files, after I got everything back I realised a fatal mistake in cloning my hard drive!!!

I discovered that only 500GB of my new 750GB hard drive could be read by Windows (including recovery modules etc.) and the other 250GB was just sitting there read as 'unallocated space' in Windows' 'Disk Management'.

I realised that my old 500GB hard drive was cloned so exact, that the computer thought my new 750GB hard drive had only 500GB!

My question is, how do I expand my C partition in my hard drive into the unallocated space so I can normally use the rest of my memory?
I've already converted the unallocated memory to NTFC but it still isn't being discovered.

Here's what it looks like in disk management, the program I was hoping would expand and merge the two partitions!

http://i53.tinypic.com/2a94qkn.jpg

I really need help activating this unallocated, sleeping partition!

Thanks
 
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