System Volume Drive Replacement

[Scofie]

I have two hard drives in my computer. The first has one large
partition (C) and is the system volume. The second has three
partitions: the boot volume (D) and two other volumes (E & F). I would
like to replace the first drive with a larger SATA drive, but I'm
concerned about being able to do it without having to reinstall.

It seems like it should be simple enough, but I don't want to do it
unless I'm sure it will work properly. From what I've been able to read
so far, it seems like the best plan of attack is to install the new
drive, copy the entirety of C onto it (including ntldr, ntdetect,
boot.ini, etc), change drive letters via the process described in
Q223188, shut down, remove old drive, boot.

( http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188 )

I'm wondering if anyone has tried to do this and if it will work in the
manner I think it will or if there's a better way to go about it. I
would love if I could convince windows to use D as both the system and
boot volumes, but I've found nothing on that being a possibility
without reinstalling. I really don't want to reinstall everything
unless there is absolutely no other way.

Thoughts?

--Chris

 

[Sharon F]

I have two hard drives in my computer. The first has one large
partition (C) and is the system volume. The second has three
partitions: the boot volume (D) and two other volumes (E & F). I would
like to replace the first drive with a larger SATA drive, but I'm
concerned about being able to do it without having to reinstall.

It seems like it should be simple enough, but I don't want to do it
unless I'm sure it will work properly. From what I've been able to read
so far, it seems like the best plan of attack is to install the new
drive, copy the entirety of C onto it (including ntldr, ntdetect,
boot.ini, etc), change drive letters via the process described in
Q223188, shut down, remove old drive, boot.

( http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188 )

I'm wondering if anyone has tried to do this and if it will work in the
manner I think it will or if there's a better way to go about it. I
would love if I could convince windows to use D as both the system and
boot volumes, but I've found nothing on that being a possibility
without reinstalling. I really don't want to reinstall everything
unless there is absolutely no other way.

Thoughts?

--Chris

I don't think that article is going to help. It is for repairing existing
drives/partitions. Not for replacing a drive and especially for replacing
the system partition which is responsible for booting (why MS named these
backwards, I have no idea). Also, copying will not create some important
elements such as partition info and the "active" mark for the partition.
This special area of the drive is accessed before ntldr and ntdetect and
must be present for the hardware change to be successful.

If these were IDE drives, I would use the tool that came with the drive to
clone the old drive to the new. Cloning is different than copying. I don't
have any SATA drives so don't know if the same kind of tool is available or
how well it works.

I'm sure someone will chime in before too long with more info for you. In
any event, good luck with this hardware upgrade. Hope it goes well for you.

 

[Scofie]

I hadn't considered the part about the partition info and I don't know
enough about SATA either. Cloning does sound like a better option if it
can be done with SATA. At the worst, I could just try it. As long as
I'm not changing anything on the original drive (and I have proper
backups of all my data), I should always be able to swap back if I
can't get it to work.

Anyway, thanks for the info and luck.

--Chris