[Win7 x64] Move partition C to another drive
Ohmster
hard drive. The other 2/3 is are logical partitions of 100Gb each. Needless
to say, I am running out of room on drive C and also want to have my OS on
my biggest and fastest hard drive that I have. In the system is another 1Tb
SATA drive broken into 4 250Gb primary partitions for storage. I just put
in another 1Tb drive last night, broke it into 4 primary partitions of
250Gb each, and gave it drive letters of L, M, N, & O. Because of this and
my mounted shares, I am running out of drive letters and cannot even plug
in a flash drive because there are no more letters left! (I have a 500Gb
Passport USB drive for backups.)
I want to Ghost my 100Gb C: system partition over to the first partition of
the new, fast, SATA, terabyte drive, currently empty as drive L:, then
while offline with Hiren's boot disc, use EASEUS Partition Master to make
the L: partition active, change it's drive letter to C: (It will be an
exact copy of the real drive C:), change the old drive C: letter to L: and
then boot up.
Question, can I do this? Will it work? Will I hose the crap out of my
system or is this a safe, recommended thing to do? Alternatively, I can
empty the other two partitions on the C: disk, then use the partition
manager to remove the partitions and have drive C: as a single 300Gb disk.
My thoughts on that is that the terabyte disk would of course be faster and
so that is the way to go for drive C:. What do you all recommend? Thanks.
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Bobby Johnson
thing when installing it actually makes 2 partition; 1 100mb & 1 with
the rest of the disc. Some of the system boot files are located in the
100mb partition for security. If this is the case then just moving the
100GB partition would render it unbootable.
I would personally recommend re-installing Win 7 allowing it to do the
partitioning. After the installation is complete you can "shrink" the
working partition.
On 2009-12-20 11:46, Ohmster wrote:
> Hi. I have Windows 7 installed on a primary 1/3 partition of a 300Gb SATA
> hard drive. The other 2/3 is are logical partitions of 100Gb each. Needless
> to say, I am running out of room on drive C and also want to have my OS on
> my biggest and fastest hard drive that I have. In the system is another 1Tb
> SATA drive broken into 4 250Gb primary partitions for storage. I just put
> in another 1Tb drive last night, broke it into 4 primary partitions of
> 250Gb each, and gave it drive letters of L, M, N,& O. Because of this and
Ohmster
news:On7YBhZg...@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl:
> It depends on how you did the installation. If you let Win 7 do its
> thing when installing it actually makes 2 partition; 1 100mb & 1 with
> the rest of the disc. Some of the system boot files are located in the
> 100mb partition for security. If this is the case then just moving the
> 100GB partition would render it unbootable.
>
> I would personally recommend re-installing Win 7 allowing it to do the
> partitioning. After the installation is complete you can "shrink" the
> working partition.
Originally I installed it over XP MCE 2005. An upgrade was not an option
with XP so I did a "fresh" install and ended up with a folder called
"windows.old" in my C: root. I just fired up EASEUS Partition Master 4.0
Professional Edition and had a look at the disk, there is no 100Mb
partition on the drive. There is a primary partition 100Gb at the very
front of the disk, then two more logical 100Gb partitions, followed by a
10Mb unallocated space. Yeah I could reinstall Windows 7 and start all
over again from scratch but that is something I really kind of want to
avoid. Because I can ghost the C: drive before doing anything, I am not
particularly worried so if it did not work, then I could restore the
image. But I really want to just transfer the disk partition from disk to
a larger partition on a much larger and faster drive than it currently
resides on. And the strategy about copying the partition over and
expanding it, labeling it offline as drive C: and making it active, then
labeling the old C: drive as the current M: drive that I am replacing it
with. Once all that is done, remove boot CD and boot the machine. Would
it just boot to the new partition as if nothing were different or will it
not work?
If nobody knows I could try it and then let you all know how it went but
I really came here for advice if anybody has any. Reinstalling to the new
partition is of course the best advice but I wish to skip that and see if
I can get away with it. Anybody else?
Bobby Johnson
Acronis True Image Home and in cases like this it will expand or
contract the image to fit the destination if you wish.
On 2009-12-20 13:38, Ohmster wrote:
> Bobby Johnson<rjoh...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
> news:On7YBhZg...@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl:
>
>> It depends on how you did the installation. If you let Win 7 do its
>> thing when installing it actually makes 2 partition; 1 100mb& 1 with
Ohmster
>
> Based on what you have below, you should be able to do it. I use
> Acronis True Image Home and in cases like this it will expand or
> contract the image to fit the destination if you wish.
Yeah I think so too Bob. Thanks for the heads up.
R. C. White
I get lost in the details of your system - just as you might get lost in the
details of mine. :^{ I also have many logical drives on my 4 HDDs and am
running out of "drive" letters. As a sometimes beta tester (Vista, Win7 and
others), I've had a number of occasions to move entire partitions -
including "boot volumes" - from place to place. I've used only the tools
built into Windows (no Acronis - and no Partition Magic since about version
6), primarily Disk Management with occasional help from DiskPart.exe - and
good old Xcopy.exe. (Yes, I know Xcopy is deprecated in favor of RoboCopy,
but I've never learned to use RoboCopy, and Xcopy still works fine in Win7
for me.)
Two keys to this process: First, don't get hung up on "drive letters".
Windows doesn't really care about them, and they often are just a
distraction for us humans. They shift like drifting sand as we reboot from
one OS to another. Give each volume a NAME; this will be written to the
disk and will remain the same, no matter which OS is running. Second, don't
try to move the current OS. To move Win7, for example, boot into Vista and
run Xcopy to move the Win7 partition. (Or boot into Vista x86 to move the
Vista x64 partition, etc.) This way, you won't have to deal with Registry
and other files that may be active and changing during the Move process.
When you are ready to move Win7 from Drive C: to Drive M:, for example, boot
into Win7 on Drive X: (or wherever you have another Windows
(Win2K/XP/Vista/Win7) installed). Open an Administrator Command Prompt
window. Use Xcopy with these switches:
Xcopy C:\ M:\ /c /h /e /r /k
To see what each of these switches do, just type Xcopy /? to get a mini-Help
file that lists all the switches and parameters available with the command.
Some of the switches I use are not necessary for this job, but I memorized
that set years ago and they still work for just about every situation when I
need Xcopy.
You could move only the C:\Windows folder tree; that contains the entire OS.
Or, at least, delete the Recycle Bin, Hiberfil.sys and Pagefile.sys from C:\
before running Xcopy; they will simply be rebuilt as needed on the new
volume. And while X: is still your current boot volume, use Disk Management
to change the drive letter of M: to C:.
That will leave you with the problems of updating your System Partition to
point to the new location of that Win7 boot volume. I think you can simply
designate your new HDD (the one that holds the M: volume that will have
become C:) as the boot device, then insert the Win7 DVD and tell it to
Repair your startup files. Let this write the boot sector and startup files
onto that HDD. You may need a final tweak of the BCD with BCDEdit or a
third-party BCD utility.
Please let us know how this works out for you.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
r...@grandecom.net
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64
"Ohmster" <ro...@dev.nul.invalid> wrote in message
news:Xns9CE7778D46...@216.196.97.131...
Ohmster
news:esPUAVmg...@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl:
> Hi, Ohmster.
Hi!
> I get lost in the details of your system - just as you might get lost
> in the details of mine.
[..]
Yeah I got lost in yours but you did a *very* good job of tracking mine.
> Two keys to this process: First, don't get hung up on "drive
> letters". Windows doesn't really care about them, and they often are
> just a distraction for us humans. They shift like drifting sand as we
> reboot from one OS to another. Give each volume a NAME; this will be
> written to the disk and will remain the same, no matter which OS is
> running. Second, don't try to move the current OS. To move Win7, for
> example, boot into Vista and run Xcopy to move the Win7 partition.
> (Or boot into Vista x86 to move the Vista x64 partition, etc.) This
> way, you won't have to deal with Registry and other files that may be
> active and changing during the Move process.
Yeah I know, labels are good and I am starting to use them, especially
with this many partitions and drives. I especially need them for backups
in Ghost or whatever program I use. It is getting difficult to tell what
partition is what but if I label my system partition "System", *that* is
something I can see when in a partition manager or backup program. I also
label my backup drive as "Backup" in order to find that as well. The
labels work out real well.
...don't "move" the OS? Oh, so as not to try and move system files that
will be in use. I have another way around that I will explain in a
minute.
[..]
>Open an Administrator
> Command Prompt window. Use Xcopy with these switches:
> Xcopy C:\ M:\ /c /h /e /r /k
[..]
Xcopy?? Wow, now there is a moldy oldie for sure. But hey, if it works
right and gets the job done, why not? The only thing about Xcopy that I
did not like was that it was slow. Very, very slow, especially with
thousands of files. You pretty much have to get the switches right to
answer the correct prompts, start it up, and go to bed. I don't think
that is something I can sit and watch and then move on to the next step.
What I do is use a free boot CD, there is a really, really good one out
there but you have to look hard to find a proper download site for it
called "Hiren's Boot CD". (Google for it.) Now at version 10.1, this
thing contains *everything* you could possibly want or need to boot up a
computer without using any hard disk OS and do what you will with the
files, drives, partitions, anything you want, even network and Internet!
You can boot to command line mode with tons of utilities or boot to a
"Mini Windows XP", a Windows XP PE boot. In mini windows you have
explorer to get at the files, Ghost, Drive Image XML, partition editors,
and tons of utilities. The free Easeus partition manager is included and
it fully supports Windows 7 and works great. You can easily merge
partitions, grow and shrink them, change drive letters, and all of that
stuff with it and it works a treat! This is what you end up getting on
the CD:
http://www.partition-tool.com/
You get Drive Image XML which is free and fully supports windows 7 or
Ghost or Acronis to move the partition over from one drive to another
intact, it will grow or shrink the partition to fit on this CD. And of
course, I can fully backup my system partition and drive before I try
anything and no matter how bad I screw it up, I can put it all back in
about an hour with these backup images. So these are the tools I had
planned to use to get this job done. It is either remove the partitions
on the 300Gb disk to give Windows more room than 100Gb it now has in its
first partition slot or just move the system partition over to a 250Gb
partition right at the begriming of my 1Tb brand new, very fast hard
drive. I think it would be best to move it to the new, fast hard drive
and get rid of so many partitions and gain some drive letters back. Right
now I have to disconnect mapped network shares just to plug in a key
chain flash drive. The free Drive Image XML tool that you get is here to
look at:
http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm
[..]
> That will leave you with the problems of updating your System
> Partition to point to the new location of that Win7 boot volume. I
> think you can simply designate your new HDD (the one that holds the M:
> volume that will have become C:) as the boot device, then insert the
> Win7 DVD and tell it to Repair your startup files. Let this write the
> boot sector and startup files onto that HDD. You may need a final
> tweak of the BCD with BCDEdit or a third-party BCD utility.
>
> Please let us know how this works out for you.
>
> RC
[..]
Ahhh, this is what I was wondering about. Does the boot partition have a
boot record that will be affected by this OS move to another drive and if
so, what to do about it? Apparently so. In the past, I have migrated
system drives all the time. Outgrow a system drive, put in a larger one,
use Ghost, Acronis, or Drive Image to move the boot drive to a larger
drive or partition, unplug the original boot drive and turn on the
computer. It boots right up as if nothing has changed and now you have
tons of space in your C: drive! Then I go back and plug in the old system
drive and can see it in My Computer to pick files off of it and when
finished doing that, a quick format on the drive wipes it clean for
storage.
So I think I will first try a hybrid of ideas, use my own strategy for
speed and use your strategy for rescue and to restore the boot partition
if need be. Definitely for sure keeping a copy of your method RC, in the
event I have to do this without all of the fancy tools that I have
available.
Since Hiren's Boot CD is a free disc, I strongly suggest that you find it
and give it a try. You can use many of the tools while in windows by
putting in the disc and allowing the autoplay feature to run and give you
a tools menu. But this disc really, really shines when you boot to CD and
fine the wealth of tools at your fingertips when you are not booted to
any hard drive OS at all and now ALL of the system files are free and
unlocked to have at if you want to. Here is what comes on the Hiren disc
if you want to see:
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd
I really need some uninterrupted time to do this, I cannot trash the
computer and then run out of time to fix it so maybe this weekend if I
can do it. I will post back what happened to those that want to know and
for the benefit of google archives. I try not to "hit and run" when I
come to Usenet for help, that is just plain rude.
Thanks!
--
~Ohmster | ohmster59 /a/t/ gmail dot com
