How to copy windows 7 to another drive/partition?

[Allieso]

Hi!

I have want to copy my installed windows 7 to another drive. I don't want to clone the partition because I have another bigger ntfs filesystem for windows on ono of the partitions of the new drive. I just want to copy the files/folder folder structure and the file attributes. What is the best way to do that? I guess some configuration modifications might be needed.

 

It might complicate things that I have some files that seem to be uncopiable/unreadable because of bad sectors. I remember windows handling these thing very poorly.

[tarquel]

I dont quite know what:

 

I don't want to clone the partition because I have another bigger ntfs filesystem for windows on ono of the partitions of the new drive.

 

means exactly but bear in mind that if you did clone the partition from the old drive onto the newer drive, you could extend the partition in Windows 7, or do all sorts with a 3rd party tool.

 

I would say thats the only real option here - trying to copy an installed Windows from one disk to another disk will pretty much always result in a waste of time (corrupt files that dont copy across at all, loss of file permissions, etc etc).

 

The only real way that I personally know, is by cloning the partition from disk to disk (note, u dont have to clone a whole disk to another - all depends on the application ur using).

 

Its been quite a long time since i've done any of this, so other than the "old" commercial PartitionMagic, I'm not up on what people use these days, but theres plenty out there - would have thought CloneZilla can do it.

 

Cheers

[3s-gtech]

You should be able to do it with a boot disc environment using robocopy with DATSOU. Never tried it myself, but that'll give an exact match of the files. Much easier just to clone it though, you can clone partitions as well as whole drives.

[ljmichael]

hi, about your quession you could use some free third-party software to copy your system partition (only used space) to another hard drive (note you could only copy your partition to an unalloacetd space) here you could read more details about "how to copy partition to another hard drive"