Restore Windows 7 (unpartioned drive) to a new, partitioned drive?
Thursday, June 24, 2010 by Bebi Bulma | Discussion: Windows 7
I have a slight problem. The hard drive that I have Windows installed on is a bit too noisy for me (has this very annoying hum vibration) and I would like to replace it with a different drive. Unfortunately they seem to have discontinued the drive I currently have (a 320gb) and now there's only a 500gb. I only want Windows on this drive, no data. So I had the idea of partitioning the drive to have the Windows partition and use the other for data storage. My problem is this...is there a way to restore a system image to the new system partition on the new drive and still leave it partitioned?
I did some googling and apparently there are no answers on how to do this using the Windows 7 system image feature. It would wipe the whole (new) drive and make an exact copy of how the old one is (no partitions). I'd rather not waste all that 500gb which is why I want to partition the drive. I'm looking at Acronis and trying to read through the user guide, but it's going a bit over my head.
Has anyone done this before, and can Acronis (or something else) do what I want to do?
Reply #2 Thursday, June 24, 2010 6:44 PM
The best way is to partition your current drive to the size you want to use on your new drive. Partition your new drive to that size also, then use Acronis to copy across.
Acronis makes an image of the partition, so you can only copy across to the same size or larger.
But... what's to stop you partitioning the 500Gb after you have Windows on there? Resizing a partition is easy in W7, just use the shrink option for your current partition then create a new partition in the space left.
Reply #3 Thursday, June 24, 2010 6:46 PM
So just go ahead and restore the image, then partition the disk afterward? Guess that makes sense. It's been years since I've messed with partitions. The big question right now seems to be if Windows can restore it to a new drive at all. Several different articles on recovering Windows, but no real answers as to how to restore to a new drive when the old one fails. Seems to be counter-productive. 
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Reply #1 Thursday, June 24, 2010 6:39 PM
Blow in the image in and then partition via disk management.