Ghosting Laptop Drive to New Larger Disk In A New System Build

demoneye · 25 Jul 2015 at 13:55

I've got a Dell laptop disk that was originally W7 and was upgraded to W8. This was then completely replaced with a SSD and a new W8 licence.

I've put the old HDD back in the laptop and can see a recovery portion. I can see no way of building backup media of the OS to transfer to a new build.

Is it possible to "Ghost" the entire image from a 320Gb HDD to a larger 1Tb drive, thus moving the licence? I'm looking at building a system with a Hybrid disk, not sure if that would be a factor.

demoneye · 25 Jul 2015 at 14:00

Just found this - is it still valid for W8 installations?

http://www.pagestart.com/win7bckuprstrnhd072610.html

Taking this into account, if I just burn some media for my second W8 (a full licence) and use that for my new system I can then migrate my old W7->W8 HDD image to my 500GB laptop SSD! Does that make sense?

I'd end with the new build having a the full W8 licence and my laptop SSD having the W7->W8 license.

ED209 · 25 Jul 2015 at 15:40

you could follow this guide.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18576917

the full W 8.1 license you can do what you want with and move it to a new system or do a re install, if you need the 8.1 os disk you can use microsofts tool to do so

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

can create a USB stick or ISO file to burn to DVD

Haggisman · 27 Jul 2015 at 15:26

Clonezilla sounds like it should do what you want, or gparted

demoneye · 27 Jul 2015 at 15:46

After successfully managing the transfer (though I had to tweak with DISKPART and BCDEDIT and spent hours getting it to boot) I ended up with a unuseable and unrepairable partition after a partition resizing operation crashed on the SSD!!! :mad:

In the end, I found a Win8.1 license online for £30 - this was a painful process for me and I won't be venturing there again in the near future! :cool:

KIA · 28 Jul 2015 at 10:28

Did you use Macrium Reflect?

demoneye · 28 Jul 2015 at 10:50

I did - the source disk contained 3 partitions and I only selected one of those to clone - I think that's why I ran into issues requiring DISKPART and BCDEDIT as the cloned partition ended up in the middle of the target, with an "unknown" partition type before it (almost like a pad?).