Transferring Win7 from drive to drive

[Samapico]

Hello good people,

I’ll try to be brief I think I know where I’m going with this, but I’d like some second thoughts

Current setup:
Hard drive 1 ©: 250Gb SATA with Windows 7 installed (non-OEM and legal)
Hard drive 2 (D): 1.5Tb SATA with 1 large extended partition

I’m starting to have trouble with my C drive… the writing speed is atrocious (drops to about 1MB/s after the first 100MB’s or so), and my whole computer periodically freezes, I am guessing, as a result of it. Everything seems to be waiting for the drive at some points. I started moving most of my software, outlook data files, etc. to my D drive, and it helped, but I can’t move Windows as easily
I think I posted about this drive problem here a while ago…

So, I want to install Win7 on what is currently my D drive. I cannot shrink the extended partition (only the logical partition that is in it), so I have to reformat the whole thing and remake it with 2 partitions (or at least a primary partition)

I was going to proceed like this:
-Create a disk image with the Windows 7 utility (done)
-Put the disk image, and backup of the current D partition on an external hard drive
-Unplug C, Format D, Make new partitions C and D on large drive
-Put in win7 dvd, and tell it to install from a disk image (will I be able to browse to an Ethernet external hard drive???)

And then, will I be able to activate my license? Or will I need to call Microsoft? I’m guessing it checks against a couple of hardware components, and since my motherboard is the same, for example, it shouldn’t bother.
Would be simpler if you could just de-activate a windows license… srsly

So am I going through this the right way?

Wasn’t very brief, in the end… oh well.

[sersoft]

unplug old hdd, then install windows 7 aio activated

[Samapico]

aio? searches
Looks like some illegal crap… I have a perfectly valid license of windows ô.o

[Jeannotvb]

What is this ‘freezing’ you’re talking about, does the computer completely lock up with looping sound? If so, do you have an ASUS motherboard?

[FireTime]

you could attempt to image the drive and do a 1:1 copy to the new drive. When you boot up the the newdrive nothing should have changed (apart from the new HDD). From there you could either mark the rest of the unallocated space as a new partition or you could attempt to expand it using a 3rd party tool like g parted, this may freek windows out (50/50 shot) but inserting a win7 recovery disk should make it calm down.

[Samapico]

@Jeannotvb

What is this ‘freezing’ you’re talking about, does the computer completely lock up with looping sound? If so, do you have an ASUS motherboard?

No looping sound, but the processes using the hard drive lock up for 1 to 5 seconds. For example, my Chrome often does that, but it’s not a complete freeze, but nothing responds for a while.

And if I copy a large file on the drive, it locks up real bad (same thing, but it takes much longer because more data is being written)

[BloodShadow]

@Samapico

No looping sound, but the processes using the hard drive lock up for 1 to 5 seconds. For example, my Chrome often does that, but it’s not a complete freeze, but nothing responds for a while.

And if I copy a large file on the drive, it locks up real bad (same thing, but it takes much longer because more data is being written)

Don’t install windows on one drive - its recommended to have two drives one for windows and one for data.
I had my windows installed at one drive and it lock’s up everytime I wrote files one my data partition now I have a second drive and it works fine. Use this tool https://sourceforge.jp/projects/crystaldiskinfo/downloads/43436/CrystalDiskInfo2_7_5b.zip/ to show the S.M.A.R.T status of your drive.
If it show failurs you shuld buy a new drive!
Also another question had you ever defragmented your disk?
If not try this tool https://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download/ it’s much better then the windows defragmentation.

[Samapico]

The disk is not fragmented;
And I’ll install windows on my data drive temporarily, cause I’ll upgrade my hardware in the future to something that supports 64bits, and then I might get another drive.

And to be honest, my computer worked much better when I had everything on the same drive
It’s actually since I installed that 2nd drive that the first one sucks, but I even tried rebooting with only one drive and it still sucked, and I tried a bunch of cable/channel-swapping, so the only remaining logical explanation is: the drive sucks.
Every test I ran on it were fine, except the windows performance index which just locks up and aborts. But I couldn’t do any write test on it, because all the tools that do that tell you that will fuck up the partition.

[BaTz281]

@FireTime

you could attempt to image the drive and do a 1:1 copy to the new drive. When you boot up the the newdrive nothing should have changed (apart from the new HDD). From there you could either mark the rest of the unallocated space as a new partition or you could attempt to expand it using a 3rd party tool like g parted, this may freek windows out (50/50 shot) but inserting a win7 recovery disk should make it calm down.

I concur with this statement. When you imaged the drive, did you do a sector-by-sector copy or just the active partition? I think you can restore a partition image to a larger destination, but a sector-by-sector image will only restore to a same-sized partition (as the source of the image). Then you can do what FireTime said (although you shouldn’t need G-Parted, as far as I know, Win7’s disk manager is much better at handling drive expansion/shrinking/allocation/etc).

[Samapico]

I used Win7’s disk image utility. I should be able to copy it back on my other drive with Win7’s DVD, and adjust the partitions how I want. Win7’s partition handling works really well with shrinking and expanding, as you said. The only thing it can’t do, is shrinking an ‘extended’ partition. It can only shrink the logical partitions within it. Otherwise this whole thing would have already been done But now I need to backup all my stuff on an external drive which I need to borrow…
I should have it tonight, let’s hope it goes well

[sersoft]

@FireTime

you could attempt to image the drive and do a 1:1 copy to the new drive. When you boot up the the newdrive nothing should have changed (apart from the new HDD). From there you could either mark the rest of the unallocated space as a new partition or you could attempt to expand it using a 3rd party tool like g parted, this may freek windows out (50/50 shot) but inserting a win7 recovery disk should make it calm down.

I’ve done this and I wouldn’t recommend it, cloning a partition takes time and at minimum the bootmgr needs to be reinstalled, also make sure to set the partition to hidden and set the drive letter to none before cloning otherwise your copy won’t be C:\

[Samapico]

I’ll let the windows 7 install setup do all this for me… According to the disk image utility, you can tell the setup to install from a disk image, so I’m confident that it will do just fine
Only thing I’m not sure is if I’ll be able to browse to an ethernet external drive for the image. I’m guessing yes, since large networks do exactly that when ghosting several machines with the same image.

[BaTz281]

@Samapico

I’ll let the windows 7 install setup do all this for me… According to the disk image utility, you can tell the setup to install from a disk image, so I’m confident that it will do just fine
Only thing I’m not sure is if I’ll be able to browse to an ethernet external drive for the image. I’m guessing yes, since large networks do exactly that when ghosting several machines with the same image.

I’m not sure if I would bank on having network connectivity via such an application. I’m not saying you WON’T, and I know Ghost supports networking (provided you include NIC drivers on the GhostBootCD) but I don’t know if Windows can account for all possible NICs on their boot disk.

[Samapico]

I’m back…

Everything worked out in the end… Here’s the conclusion:

The windows 7 recovery from a drive image lets you browse to a network location easily. Turns out the external drive my friend let me borrow was USB though, so it worked anyway.
BUT I was not able to restore the image on the non-partitionned larger drive, even though it gave me the option to ‘cleanup and format partitions’ or something like that. I presume it could only work to restore on the same hard drive.
Anyway, I mostly cared about my data that I backed up, so I just did a clean install in the end.
And Windows 7 just activated without a problem. So I guess only a major hardware change could invalidate a license.

And everything is much smoother now

Thanks again for the comments

[BaTz281]

@Samapico

I’m back…

Everything worked out in the end… Here’s the conclusion:

The windows 7 recovery from a drive image lets you browse to a network location easily. Turns out the external drive my friend let me borrow was USB though, so it worked anyway.
BUT I was not able to restore the image on the non-partitionned larger drive, even though it gave me the option to ‘cleanup and format partitions’ or something like that. I presume it could only work to restore on the same hard drive.
Anyway, I mostly cared about my data that I backed up, so I just did a clean install in the end.
And Windows 7 just activated without a problem. So I guess only a major hardware change could invalidate a license.

And everything is much smoother now

Thanks again for the comments

Generally, it takes a big hardware change to make Windows complain about activation (motherboard, processor, or a combination of multiple peripherals on the same boot). Glad to hear it worked out relatively well.