Hey guys,

I'm currently stuck with cloning and self-booting my 320GB to a bigger 500GB drive. I've used XXClone but that doesn't work so I went to use Win 7's built-in system image creator. Created an image on my 320GB drive then popped in my 500GB one and booted from the System Repair disk. After that, I connected the 320GB drive via SATA2-USB bridge. I kept trying to restore using the image created onto my bigger drive but it kept telling me about failure (forgot the elaborated error code). I'm now thinking of changing the drive letters of my 320GB drive then create a new image then try cloning to the 500GB. Will that work or there's more work to it? Apparently I noticed my slotted-in drive (500GB for cloning) is labelled C: and the main OS partition of the 320GB is also C: so that's what I think about the error. Help much needed. Thanks.

P.S. It is a laptop I'm talking about so only one hard drive in it at a time.

Why don't you just try changing the drive letter? It's a work of a few seconds and you'll see what happens.

Yeah I'm doing it right now though I'll image it later in the day since I'm dead tired after a day of trying to make things work. >.<

I'm thinking of using EASEUS ToDo Backup Free 2.51 if the changing of drive letters don't work as well.

P.S. Do my 500GB drive have to be fully unallocated in order for my image from 320GB (hooked by the aforementioned SATA-USB bridge) to clone over? Since I see the target directory as //volume (blablablabla) C:

try using "PartED Magic 5.6 Live-Linux" and Clonezilla (The app that does the actual cloning)
DL the image, burn, start from it, start clonezilla follow the instructions (remember the way you want to copy [device-wise]) wait till the jobs done.
Swap HDDs and there you go.


http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=screenshots

gparted is an evil tool... it messed up my laptop's hard drive so that nothing else but gparted can edit it.

Quote :

cfdisk: FATAL ERROR: Bad logical partition 6: enlarged logical partitions overlap

like wtf...

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Can anyone please take me through whether EASEUS ToDo Backup Free can allow me to clone a drive and make it self-bootable?

I would do exact copy to the larger drive on usb, using dd in linux. (very low level, would take a day or two)
Then swap in the larger drive and boot it. Then finally expand the partition to the full drive.

Boot linux to command promt (linux live on usbstick).
"fdisk -l" to verify both disks are online and that /dev/sda is the smaller disk and /dev/sdb is the larger.
then "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=notrunc bs=8M" and wait and wait and wait.

There are Acronis free that does all you need but it maybe only works if the destinationdrive is of a brand that licenses acronis.

I managed to do that in 2 hours with EASEUS Todo Backup Free successfully so I guess this thread is not needed anymore.

Oh wait, I have another problem HERE with my LCD monitor for my old desktop. Can anyone tell me what that is and any fix? Please post on that thread if you have a comment. Thanks.