Will Win7 Hidden Install Partition Still Work After Cloning and Restoring to a New Hard Drive

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I have a laptop with Windows 7 whose hard drive is failing. There is no install disk and a fresh install is done via the bios and a hidden partition containing the Win7 install files.

I'd like to make an image of the drive with Clonezilla, then restore it to a new larger hard drive ( maybe expanding the current partitions to fill the new drive ) and then perform a fresh install.

Will this work? Does the bios restore program usually look at a particular disk address, or is it usually smart enough to look for a particular partition via the partition table at the beginning of the disk?

Robert S. Barnes

Posted 2014-06-12T14:17:13.343

Reputation: 609

Answers

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Yes i have done it numerous times for clients, but make sure the hard disk is the same size or you will run into problems especially if the drive is smaller than the source. As for expanding you will need to use Linux live CD the restore will only use the same size partition as the original

Andrew Crawford

Posted 2014-06-12T14:17:13.343

Reputation: 196

The new disk will be about twice the size of the old disk. I'm using Clonezilla via a PartedMagic live CD. – Robert S. Barnes – 2014-06-12T14:23:16.663

It should work fine, the biggest problem i ever have is when the original disk might be corrupt either through bad sector or bad read write action that has corrupted some files. – Andrew Crawford – 2014-06-12T14:24:54.623

And you've done a fresh install from the new restored disk? – Robert S. Barnes – 2014-06-12T14:30:14.603

Yes i have done fresh install from cloned drive but i have had failed installed, make sure you keep the original if all goes pear shaped use the original, the cloning process can muck it up at times to – Andrew Crawford – 2014-06-12T16:55:28.823

Asked: 2014-06-12T14:17:13.343

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Active: 2014-06-12T14:20:24.713