I am seriously happy that I could move my vista partition to another hard disk. I recently just bought a 750 gig Western Digital that has nearly double the read and write speed. I didn't want to go and re-install Windows Vista for the 3rd time this month. My new computer is just smoking fast, but hey, disk IO is very important also.
So, I did a quick Google search, and I found some people saying it could not be done, reinstall.. blah blah. Then I saw in a thread.. it was the very last post.. "use Gparted". I was like "what is gparted" so my Google search changed to looking for this new tool.
I downloaded it. It was an ISO. I burned it to my CD, and away I went.
Now, at this point, I was prepared to re-install windows if it came down to it. I would recommend you do a backup, although I think you will be ok without.
The program includes a screen shot option, but I didn't use it. I am going to give you the instructions from memory if you are trying to do this yourself.
Some more links before we get started:
GParted home page: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php
GParted screen shots: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
- Download "GParted" from sourceforge.net: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828
- Burn the ISO (using something like Nero)
- Shut down your computer
- Install your new hard drive
- Make sure your computer is set to boot of CD-ROM - keep the freshly burned disk in your cd drive.
- Let the program boot up. I selected the first option, and things went perfectly.
- A nice GUI will boot.. and you are now using the GParted tools. This is very powerful and you can toy around with some cool stuff including a nice shell
- Go to the disk that contains your Windows Vista Partition (/dev/sda1 usually)
- Right click on the disk, and click "Copy"
- Go to the destination disk that you want Vista to be on (or any OS really) and right paste.
- Apply the changes. This will take a while, depending on the size and data content of your disks. It took my 30 gigs of storage about 10 - 20 minutes to transfer
- Right click on the new disk and select "flags" and click on the "boot" check mark which will make that partition bootable.
- Double click on the exit button at the top left. Shut down
- Open up your computer, and put your primary disk on SATAII0 or what ever port you can to make it be the first drive in your system
- Attempt to boot your machine. If your windows vista starts up and throws a huge error that it cant find the boot files.. dont sweat it. If it boots right up.. you dont need the rest of this tutorial.
The following is if you rebooted and your windows system did not start. Just whip out your Vista Install disk. You will love this new feature of their installer.
- Pop in your Vista CD
- Boot into the Vista Installer
- Click on "Repair Windows" -- This is cool. It detected my problem, and fixed my system to point at the right device. My old windows was Dynamic, so I assume it pointed the boot to the new basic disk.
- Click on "update and restart"
- Pull your Vista CD out of your CD drive.
If all worked out.. you will now be on the way to booting your Windows Vista on your new hard drive.
I used this tool GParted to also resize my 60 gig partition to 120 gigs. I don't usually install anything on the OS partition, but stuff that has to be re-installed on a Windows re-install usually gets placed on that drive.
My admin at my hosting company (www.amhosting.com) will be very pleased that I used Linux to fix a Windows Issue. He is hardcore, and is always getting me to use new linux tool sets. He has saved my windows windows machines a couple of times using other cool Linux tools. I am actually becoming very fond of Linux. If I was not obsessed with the new UI and performance of Vista, I may be doing an Ubuntu desktop.
Good luck. This really was a cool tool to use.