I ordered a 10k rpm drive when my hard drive died last week. I created a C: drive the size of the drive I ordered (minus the 100MB for System space) and installed the Win 7 RC. Now that I have the new drive installed, what is the fastest or easiest way to clone the current one? I created a "backup" image of the windows partition, but the recovery disk wouldn't place it on a different drive. I already reinstalled a bunch of stuff on here and I'd prefer not spending extra time redoing things again since I'll have to anyway when its time to install my pre-ordered Vista->7 update that's only home edition. I've looked at a couple of articles with free software listed but they don't include much info on dealing with Win 7. I'll be playing around with my other ideas but in case they don't work, maybe someone has a simple solution.
have you looked into Ghosting your drive (copying all of the data from one drive to another) i think it requires a boot disk... Look into the wiki article and see if any of this fulfills your needs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(software) I should mention that my family did this to keep our files separate... my dad ghosted the initial system on to several swap drives and gave each person in the family a drive for the HD bay... so we have to boot our drive every time we want to use it... this is our way of one family member not getting viruses on the computer for other family members... aka my stepmom for everyone else hahaha
Make a new partition on your new drive. Can be any size. Use Norton Ghost 11. It's DOS-based and runs off a CD (don't worry, it has a GUI). Use the "From Image" option and "To Partition". If you haven't created an image (the one made in Windows doesn't count), you can simply use "From Disk" and "To Partition" It's the simplest method yet.
yeah. ill look into ghost. the problem with things like partition magic and others i tried today is that they didn't copy properly within Windows 7... ill look into it, but im getting to the point where i may just pop back on vista and reinstall since i basically have vent, wow, and a couple of utility programs and ill probably need to re-vista before upgrading to windows 7 anyway when the actual release happens