Hard Disk Cloning (PCs) [Windows 7 disk's clone]
Cloning a Hard Disk with Windows 7 is not an easy task, but it is possible. The scenario is the following; One 20GB HDD with Windows 7 Ultimate running fine. One 250GB HDD empty. So, we need to put Windows 7 on the faster and biggest disk. To clone the Windows disk we will use Fedora Live CD 11, in fact we will use only the dd command.
- Install the hard disks in the PC.
- Boot the machine with the Live CD.
Open a Terminal to type in, the following commands;
/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/myDisk ;;to check the state and partitions of the disk [optional].
man fdisk ;;to check the options of the fdisk command [optional].
dd if=/dev/smallDisk of=/dev/bigDisk ;; to copy the smallDisk into the bigDisk
- Shutdown the machine
- Disconnect the smallDisk from the machine
- Boot and reconfigure the boot options to boot from the bigDisk
- Boot the machine …
- Voila!, You have Windows 7 in the bigDisk, but the partition size is incorrect.
- Open the Computer Management and go to Disk Management section
- Right click on the small partition and click “Extend Volume …” follow up the wizard and that’s all.
Now we have a bootable Windows 7 in the bigDisk with all the space we want.