Moving Vista to another hard disk

Christo · 26 Sep 2007 at 13:37

I have just reinstalled Vista, install everything, tweaked it etc, then realised I shouldnt have installed it on the hard disk I did! Can I copy my existing installation or whole volume to another disk? I have a partition on another disk I want to move it to (50gb) and its currently installed on a 70gb partition but using 30gb.

Would Norton Ghost do this for me? My problem is the bootloader - how will it 'realise' I have moved partitions?

Priapus · 26 Sep 2007 at 16:25

Sorry to HiJack the thread. But does Ghost 2003 work with Vista?

point decay · 26 Sep 2007 at 16:55

you could try doing a "complete pc backup" in vista then re-image that to the partition you want.

Deks · 27 Sep 2007 at 20:44

I have swapped whole installs from drive to drive using Acronis True Image 10 Home. Its a fantastic piece of software. Its only about £15 if you look around

Deks

Corasik · 28 Sep 2007 at 01:25

I cloned a Vista64 OEM install, using R-Drive Image. Worked fine, everything went without a hitch.. Well almost. Vista through a fit, and deactivated itself, wouldnt reactivate online. However a quick call to microsoft, and didnt even need to speak to an operator, Just followed the instructions on the touch tone system, and it gave me a new activate key.

Sorted. Was pretty straight forward. I believe this happened because it detected the disk was a different brand/size to the orginal, and I resized the system partition.

Anyway not a problem. Basically ghost the physical drive, not the partitions themselves. That way it copies the boot loader as well, and because you'll be booting off the copied disk, everything will be as it should. You may need to reactivate windows afterwards.