Easy way to clone Win7 Boot Drive?

Disjunto

Disjunto

Disjunto

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Anyone know of an easy way to clone a Win7 boot drive? All the solutions I have tried have failed at copying boot records and things for it. I found a mention of robocopy, but that seems to get stuck in an infinite loop within My Documents, and just chews up my hdd space going as deep into dir tree as it wants to make up (there seems to be a symlink point back to my docs somewhere, and it's treating it as a new folder) :|

Only solution I've found is to copy everything and then rebuild the boot records from the install disk, but that would involve me actually finding my install disks :D
 
I used an acronis true image boot disk to clone my c drive to my new ssd, was very simple to do. The downside was that it messed up the alignment so after some farting trying to get the alignment correct I just erased the ssd and reinstalled.
 
JeffyB said:
I used an acronis true image boot disk to clone my c drive to my new ssd, was very simple to do. The downside was that it messed up the alignment so after some farting trying to get the alignment correct I just erased the ssd and reinstalled.
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W7 built-in system image creator will keep all the alignments correct without having to do this. Plus it's free!
 
Depending upon the HDDs that you have in your box, if Seagate try Diskwizard, if Maxtor then MaxBlast, or if WD, then Acronis True Image WD version (all of which are Acronis True Image with a couple of minor features removed), or Clonezilla...

But the built in backup feature of Win 7 is very good, but be aware it will only restore the backup to a HDD of same size or bigger...
 
I read about that somewhere and was why i made a partition on another drive a smidge smaller than my ssd for the image. I still have that image so in theory i could restore it, it was made with acronis though so would the w7 tool be able to restore it or would i need to restore with acronis again and then use the w7 tool to make a new image?
 
JeffyB said:
I read about that somewhere and was why i made a partition on another drive a smidge smaller than my ssd for the image. I still have that image so in theory i could restore it, it was made with acronis though so would the w7 tool be able to restore it or would i need to restore with acronis again and then use the w7 tool to make a new image?
Click to expand...

A short while ago I had 2 x SSDs in RAID (total size 149GB) partitioned into 2, 1 x 78.5GB (C:\), the other at around 70GB (D:\), I decided I wanted to spilt the RAID0 and go back to separate SSDs both @ 74.5GB, so knowing that Win 7 wouldn't restore to a smaller sized SSD, I made the 78.5GB partition 72GB and then made a new backup image with Win 7, then split the RAID volume and went to put the new backup, which was made of a 72GB partition onto an SSD of 74.5GB, however, when I ran it, it complained that the restore could not be accomplished...it seems that Win7 backup considers the size of the SSD/HDD the important thing and not the partition size...

I eventually did the restore from the RAID0 to (single) SSD with Acronis True Image Home 2010, so I would be inclined to use Acronis TI to restore the backup to your SSD and then make a new one with Win 7...
 
The only reason i might do it is my itunes library and i'm not too fussed to redo that anyway. My alignment is perfect now and performance is where its ment to be so i think i'll just stick to this fresh install now. Thanks for the information though, i may need that in the future :)
 
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