Transfering vista onto other hardrive with out reinstall

[haha49]

Basicly the title says it all Im picking up a newer bigger and faster drive and I dont want to go through the hassel of reinstalling everything agian so whats the easyest free way to basicly clone the drive to a bigger drive Ive used a few programs in the past and because it was vista it didnt like me doing that and wouldnt boot and forced me to reinstall it Im lazy and dont want to reinstall my 190 programs.. all they typeing of serial numbers yuck..

Useing vista 64bit home premuim

[Datech]

The best way I can think of is use VMware Converter on another computer to convert the original drive to a VM, then try to convert the VM to the new hard drive. That's probably your safest way and you'll have a backup. If you do this or if you just straight copy, you're going to need another computer, its going to take a while, and it might not work.

[x88x]

Well, you could either use backup software like DriveClone Pro, or, since you're just going form one drive to another, you could boot to a Linux live-cd with both of the HDDs plugged into the system and run:

dd if=/dev/[sourceHDD] of=/dev/[destinationHDD]

For example, if the old HDD was identifying as /dev/sda and the destination drive was mounting as /dev/sdb it would be:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Since Linux actually has raw-level access to all drives on the system, it will just do a bit-for-bit copy of the old drive onto the new one, partition table, MBR, everything. You'll have to then expand the partition on the new drive using a tool such as gparted (also included on many Linux live-cds), but that's easy (I can give you instructions on that too, but it's a gui-driven app, so it's pretty easy to figure out). Personally I'd go the dd/gparted route because it would be the fastest way, but if you want to implement a backup system anyways, DriveClone Pro is a nice product, and version 6 has a feature that automatically resizes the partition on the destination drive to the full size of the drive.

EDIT:
@ Datech: Fyi, vmware doesn't actually have a V2P tool, they just say to use imaging tools (DriveClone, Ghost, etc) to take an image of the VM, then load that image onto a physical system.

[Airbozo]

...I don't have a vista install to check this, but isn't there a utility already in vista for just this purpose?

[Datech]

EDIT:
@ Datech: Fyi, vmware doesn't actually have a V2P tool, they just say to use imaging tools (DriveClone, Ghost, etc) to take an image of the VM, then load that image onto a physical system.

Pretty sure your right, I was thinking about the similar tools that come with VMware Infrastructure, and I doubt haha49 wants to pay 3 grand for that.

[x88x]

Pretty sure your right, I was thinking about the similar tools that come with VMware Infrastructure, and I doubt haha49 wants to pay 3 grand for that.

Hahaha, yeah...I'd imagine not. VMWare does have their free V2P tool, which is pretty awesome, but I wasn't aware that they had a V2P tool even in VSphere (what Infrastructure turned into recently). That's pretty cool that they have it, if a little dickish of them to only put it in VSphere.

[OvRiDe]

The best way I can think of is use VMware Converter on another computer to convert the original drive to a VM, then try to convert the VM to the new hard drive. That's probably your safest way and you'll have a backup. If you do this or if you just straight copy, you're going to need another computer, its going to take a while, and it might not work.

Wow.. some points for creative thinking.. but thats like swatting a fly with a Buick!

Actually all you need is one of the many available disk cloning tools, such as Ghost or Acronis which are commercial/pay solutions. But there are many opensource solutions that are based off of what x88x was explaining. I would recommend Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/) It runs off a live cd, and is menu driven. Its pretty straight forward and works well for single application, meaning just needing it one time for this particular machine. I have used it several times when our mass imaging solution was just to cumbersome to get what I needed done.

[haha49]

Wow.. some points for creative thinking.. but thats like swatting a fly with a Buick!

Actually all you need is one of the many available disk cloning tools, such as Ghost or Acronis which are commercial/pay solutions. But there are many opensource solutions that are based off of what x88x was explaining. I would recommend Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/) It runs off a live cd, and is menu driven. Its pretty straight forward and works well for single application, meaning just needing it one time for this particular machine. I have used it several times when our mass imaging solution was just to cumbersome to get what I needed done.

arcons and ghost didnt work I have both... old ghost 2002 dont like vista.. arcois bought reasonly copys drive but fails when it wants to boot some stubid protection in vista stoping it.. so they both dont boot after.. did that once already...


I going to just reinstall and say screw the clone takes more time then cloneing lots of updates to redownload but screw it..

[x88x]

Well, if you're gonna reinstall anyways, then go 7!

[SXRguyinMA]

7 is nice