partitioning - Installing Windows clone on a Hybrid Drive

07
2014-07
  • Mysteriousness

    I recently bought a Seagate Momentus XT (750 GB) Hybrid Drive. Before I took out my old hard drive I made a clone of my Windows partition and stored it on an external hard drive(I used partition wizard to copy the contents of my hard drive and dump them on the external drive, no disk image). After installing the new hard drive I put in a Gparted Live CD and copied the clone to a partition set up on my new Hybrid drive. I then made the freshly copied partition the active boot partition. I tried to boot multiple times and each time I encountered a black screen with a dash appearing and then disappearing in the top left corner, if I pressed any key on the keyboard I would hear a beep. I tried to reboot multiple times and even deleted the new partition on the Hybrid drive, making a new one and copying the clone. I have my Windows 7 Professional install DVD and put in the 64 bit disc(as you may have guessed I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 Professional). I then exhausted all of the repair options before finally giving up. The clone has all of the drivers that my current hardware setup requires. Re-installing Windows and needing to find all of these again would be a painstakingly long process. Could somebody help me identify the problem?

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    Related Question

    partitioning - How can I copy my windows 7 partition to a new drive, keeping the boot partition?
  • thecoop

    I want to copy my windows 7 partition onto a new hard drive (I've got a linux bootcd with fdisk, which I'm happy using), but I've spotted that there's a boot partition of ~200MB before my main windows 7 partition with some strange settings; fdisk complains that the partition boundary isn't on a cylinder. I've also read that changing this boot partition can cause problems (http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/01/09/how-to-avoid-200mb-hidden-system-partition-from-been-created-during-windows-7-installation/)

    How can I copy my windows 7 partition & the associated boot partition without breaking anything?


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  • Duijf

    You can use dd within Linux to clone your Hard drive.

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

    Where /dev/sda is the hard drive you want to clone and where /dev/sdb is the hard drive you want to copy it to. Make sure /dev/sda is unmounted.

    This will clone your entire hard drive without compression, any empty sectors will be copied with it. Other partitions will be copied aswel.

    You can also make an image of your hard drive you can then restore later.

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/image.iso

  • user83241

    Try a program called 'clonezilla'. It requires you to boot from it. It copies the whole drive.

  • Doltknuckle

    I like Easeus Disk Copy. It's simple, free, and does a sector by sector clone of a drive. I've done this many times to save failing systems.