October 22, 2009

Migrating Windows7 to New Hard Drive

I just got a new, larger hard drive for my work PC (thanks Ed!) and wanted to make it my primary drive. I didn’t want to have to reinstall Windows7 and all my apps so I looked around for some way to migrate the contents of the old drive to the new one. The “recommended” method appears to be that one should first create a full system image (a feature built into Windows7) and then restore that image to the new drive via a Windows7 Repair Disc. Although full system images can be stored to a net share, unfortunately the repair disc doesn’t allow net share access (at least not for Windows7 RC repair discs).

I didn’t have a spare third drive, all the external drives in my lab are already full, and file server couldn’t be used, so I simply couldn’t use the system image restore method at all. Instead, I looked around for a method of doing a disk-to-disk clone. My lab has an older copy Norton Ghost, but I wasn’t sure if it would be able to correctly copy the boot loader, and I didn’t want to bother with registering the software either.

Instead, I found an OpenSource project called Clonezilla (https://clonezilla.org/). This software does essentially the same thing as Norton Ghost, and there is also a version than can do distributed cloning (such as doing an install for a computer lab).

I gave it a shot and it worked great after a minor fix. Everything was copied successfully, including the boot loader. When I attempted boot, Windows detected an error with the boot loader though. I let Windows attempt a repair, and it told me no problems were found. The problem went away after that though. I suspect that the boot loader had a reference to the name or other characteristics of the drive and this got updated during the repair.

One other minor issue was that Clonezilla created a partition exactly the same size as my old, smaller drive on the new one. I bet that there are some advanced settings in Clonezilla that would have let me fix this, but Windows Disk Management lets you extend the size of NTFS-formatted partitions easily.

I still haven’t seen any Windows Activation errors either, so hopefully that will be a non-issue. I can definitely say Clonezilla is worth checking out if you face a similar problem as I did and don’t want to purchase Norton Ghost, etc. Just make sure you back up all your important stuff first.