Move my Vista Installation

[marco]

Just bought a new hard drive and would like to move my Vista installation
onto this drive. I want to make this my (real) c:

What's the best or most painless way to achieve this? My original
installation was a dual boot XP and now I no longer need XP and have deleted
it but the boot files still reside on that drive. (So my current Vista
installation is actually on D: though Vista sees it as C I really don't
want to re-install and re-configure everything so if there's a way around it
I'd be grateful to know about it.

Thanks in advance

 

[Guest]

macro,

this can be done by moving every single file that windows is relying on to
the new C:\ drive, then you would have to write new partition tables and
master boot records. So, I would imagine that a re-install would be alot
easier.

 

[Don]

macro,

this can be done by moving every single file that windows is relying on to
the new C:\ drive, then you would have to write new partition tables and
master boot records. So, I would imagine that a re-install would be alot
easier.

What you say is true, but it couldn't hurt to try this trick first:

Download a free trial of Acronis Disk Director from their website
(I happily pay them for their software, BTW) and install it in your
existing Vista.

Install your new drive as a slave anywhere you have a disk-controller
slot to spare.

Use the 'copy partition' utility of Acronis DD to make a byte-for-byte
copy of your existing Vista onto the new disk.

Now, your comments about the MBR and partition table are quite correct.
Disk Director should create a partition table on the new disk with no
extra effort. The MBR will need an extra step, and may be tricky.

The easiest way to install a sane MBR on the new disk (I think, but have
never tried it) is to install VistaBootPro on your existing Vista and
ask it to 'install the Vista boot manager' on the new disk (whatever it
may be called) using the 'all disks' option.

Now the sneaky part: reboot and enter the BIOS setup utility and set
your new disk as the first boot device. Then reboot again and see
what happens! (This is known to us old farts as the 'Smoke Test'.)

If the smoke test fails, then just reset the BIOS to use the old disk
as the boot device and ask for further advice -- nothing lost.

 

[marco]

Thanks - Looks like fun to try!
But I'm wondering why nobody has suggested windows backup and restore. Is it
not up to the task? Actually I've never tried it.