How to clone a Win7 boot partition onto the SAME hard drive?

Question

I want to have two or even three clones of my operating system partition on the same hard drive. No I don't want the clones on different hard drives. I want three partitions on one hard drive, two of which are the clones of my current system partition.

I want to power up my computer, and see 3 "Win 7" operating systems to select to boot from.

No I don't want to install windows 7 three times and reinstall all my programs/settings for each install. I want to specifically clone my current partition, because I have already programs/configs over the past year.

I have "easy to do backup" (free software), but it seems it only allows me to restore my OS partition ("boot partition") onto another physical hard disk. There is no option to do what I want.

I have searched all over the internet, and nobody wants to do what I want. They only refer to cloning a OS/boot partition onto another physical hardisk.

Anyone have a solution?

Answer 1

Did the same: Clone OS to a unallocated partition on the same drive. With Minitool partition Wizard bootable CD -> Copy partition. But to avoid that the clone has the same disk mapping (C: stays C:) I deleted in the registry HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices all Entries except (Default) before cloning. (It may also be done at the first start up of the clone if you cloned before deleting these entries, restart then immediately). This forces the operating system, when fired the first time after the deletion, to remap the drives where C: will be the current OS.

Result on OS1 C: wil be the original C: en D: will be the new OS drive. On OS2 C: will be the cloned OS partition en D: will be the original OS. If D: is not mounted, you can do so in This Computer->Manage->Disk Management yourself.

Answer 2

As you said, this isn't a common request so I haven't tested the following method and it may or may not work:

1. Install EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition

2. Resize your Windows partition so you have 2x the unallocated space available (i.e. if the Windows partition is 60 GB, make sure you have 120 GB unallocated space)

3. Copy the Windows partition twice, selecting it as the source and unallocated space as the destination:

   
   

4. [This step may not be required] Boot from the Windows DVD and perform a Startup Repair on both cloned partitions (they should show up along with the main Windows partition in the OS selection screen):

   
   

5. Install EasyBCD

6. Add new boot menu entries for both cloned partitions:

   

7. Cross your fingers and toes, reboot, check the boot menu and try and boot each cloned partition

Note 1: Partition Master cannot yet deal with cloning Windows installed on a GPT disk, so you will need to use something else to copy the partitions. It also requires unallocated space to copy to, so if you have existing partitions that you don't want to delete, search for alternatives. dd from a Linux LiveCD/USB might do the trick.

Note 2: As mentioned above, I'm not entirely sure step #4 is required. You should try without it first; maybe cloning the partitions and adding new BCD entries will be enough.

Note 3: Since I've only ever copied the system partition to a new disk to replace the old one (or back onto the old disk after a wipe), I'm not sure how cloned partitions on the same disk with different drive letters will behave.

Answer 3

@ms mann -- i really believe i've answered your question with my findings,
if i've understood your quest correctly.

because, i ran into the same problems as you wrote about in your final post --
you found that even though you were BOOTING from the desired partition,
it was actually your ORIGINAL install that was being booted --
due to the identical nature of the various internal identifiers, reg. settings, etc.

In any case, have a look at my solution post to my quest, here:

How to run a 2nd boot instance of Windows 7 on another partition?

Best!