Clone Windows 7 drive
I’ve just changed my system drive to a faster, but smaller, SSD. This would normally not be a problem using Clonezilla or similar, but the fact that the new disk was smaller than the original made the whole thing a bit trickier. What I finally did, and what seems to work.
A) Re-size the partition to clone.
- Download and install EASEUS Partition Master 8.0.1 Home Edition, which is free (as in beer).
- Change the size of my C: (win sys) disk, so that it could fit on the new one.
- Don’t forget to File -> Apply the changes made in 2.
B) Clone the partition
- Download and install EASEUS Todo Backup Free 2.5.1. For some reason I found this tool better for doing cloning than Partition Master.
- I copied the C: partition to the empty space on the new disk, using sector by sector copy.
C) Make disk bootable
- (Don’t know if needed) made sure the new drive was bootable using bcdboot (Very easy)
D) Switch drive letters
- Open regedit onto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/MountedDevices
- Changed \Dos\devices\C: to a temp letter, say X:
- Changed the new disk to have C:
- Changed X: back to something nice, like M:
E) Change boot order in BIOs
What happened now was that Windows booted up using the new disk, but, still using the old disk as system disk. To change this, the boot entry that I copied from the old disk must be edited. Looking at the boot entries using bcdedit, it said the system now booted from M:, although BIOs booted from “C:”
F) Change boot entry
- Changed the partition in the boot entry to point to the new disk (Not as hard as it may look). Using BCDEdit. Google for a better tutorial.
- Something in the lines of
bcdedit /set {current} device partiton=C:
bcdedit /set {current} device ospartiton=C:
Restart, and it worked!
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