Clone system partition windows 7

Question

I have bought a Samsung SSD drive, 256 GB. I already have Samsung HDD (512 GB) with several partitions, but now i want to reorganize my system - to move my Windows 7 system partition to the SSD.

The point is that my partition structure is a little strange - I have Windows 7 system partition (C:), Windows XP partition (don't even ask :) ) as "D:" and storage partitions are "E:", "F:", "G:" (G is a FAT32 partition - "bridge" between my Win7 and Linux on separate hdd) and "I:" partition.

Here's the picture:

As you can see "Disk1" is my SSD disk with default Win7 installation on it. I have created partitions on my original system by myself, that's why there's no that little "100 MB" system partition on my original drive. Only WinXP was present there before Win7...

What I did in order to clone my system partition before I asked for your help:

1. "DriveImage XML" program - it clones "C:" drive, but system is un-bootable and un-repairable using system disk.
2. Installed default Win7, made system image of my original partitions C and D (for some reasons "D" partition had to be included into image) and tried to restore image to the SSD disk. After about 30 minutes of restoring job is reported as "done" but when i boot my SSD disk no change is visible - I still got my "stock" Windows 7 installation. Luckily, no change is made on my original HDD. :)

What to do next? What did I do wrong?

P.S. I don't want to use Norton Ghost, I don't want to spend money for some need-it-once-in-100-years software.

Answer 1

You may well find that the W7 installation used some space on D: which is why you need it to boot.

Of course, when you create a new C: clone, depending on the order of the drives (determined by the BIOS), the drive letters change and mess everything up.

The easiest thing to do may be to disable all of the other partitions except the one you want to boot from, then install a new W7. You should then be able to turn on your data partitions. If that all works, you can try turning on the other bootable partitions but be warned that they probably wont boot any more, you will need to mess about to get the bootable Linux partition back - Win XP may need a different install - that's for another question probably - Windows installations assume that they are the only game in town and tend to take over the MBR. The W7 installation will reset the master boot record so you will loose the boot record for GRUB. I generally find it easiest to use 2 different physical drives to multi-boot several Windows versions and Linux but this depends on having good BIOS support.

Use a bootable utility CD to edit the partitions with parted or something similar. Simply view the partition table and make a careful note of all of the partitions and their partition types. Then change the partition types of all of the unwanted partitions to a null or invalid type. Change them back later, no data is lost when changing partition types this way - as long as you don't change to a different but valid type and then try to mount and use them.