How To Easily Clone Windows to a Bigger Hard Drive

One task that you don’t necessarily perform on a daily basis consist of moving or migrating your Windows partition to a different hard drive. One of the main reason for doing so is mainly when users upgrade to bigger and more powerful hard drives. By simply using the bigger drive as just a simple secondary storage unit in addition to your smaller Windows partition, you’re not really taking advantage of what you already have. Sure you can install and run programs installed on this second hard disk along with pretty much everything else you would expect from a hard disk but the drive letter will not be your familiar C:. I’m sure there are tricks and hacks out there that allows you to assign the drive letter C: to a different partition or disk besides your Windows partition but doing so is not really recommended. By migrating or cloning your existing Windows partition (which pretty much includes all of your data and programs) to the bigger and newer hard drive, you can be sure that everything remains the same once the migration process has finished. Find out how to do that by using Symantec’s Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR).

Update:
It seems that some users experience the dreaded Windows Not Genuine screen when booting from a freshly cloned Windows 7 hard drive. This problem happens even when using other third-party imaging/cloning programs because it has to do with the way Windows assigns drive letters. Luckily, I’m not the first one to discover the problem and so other users on the net have documented a simple fix to the problem. Since I have experienced the problem as well, I wrote an article detailing the problem along with helping you solve the problem. Note that if you will be cloning an existing Windows 7 hard drive by using Symantec’s BESR software, there is a chance that you will also experience this problem after the cloning process. Therefore, you might want to read this article first to see how to actually fix the problem. The article can be found here.

I got the opportunity to review and use BESR a while back and it certainly has been one the better backup software I have used in a long time. Judging by the review score I gave it, you would think that this is the perfect backup software. Well, nothing is perfect but from my time with it, I was definitely most impressed with BESR as it can do pretty much anything you ask of it. One feature that I couldn’t test at that time was the hard drive cloning feature. This feature allows you to basically copy everything from one hard drive and migrate it to a completely different hard disk within the same system. Think of it as creating an image of your existing hard drive and restoring it to a different disk. After the migration/restore process, your computer will then look at the new disk for booting into Windows. All of your data and installed programs remain absolutely intact and you most likely wouldn’t notice anything different besides that fact that your C: partition has moved to a different location!

Luckily, I convinced a good friend to purchase and install a bigger hard drive into his work system recently. And yes, I promise that I didn’t do so just because I wanted to test out this feature for myself! He downloads and records a lot of high definition videos and so his old hard drive would eventually fill up sooner or later. The hard drive we purchased was the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black, which is a very good drive by the way. Anyways, I was tasked to help him migrate the data on his existing drive to the bigger 1TB drive from Western Digital.

Using BESR to Clone Your Windows Partition

One of the best things with using Symantec’s BESR software to clone your hard drive is that it doesn’t cost you a penny to do so. Although BESR itself is not a freeware, Symantect allows you to install and use the program on your computer for a full 60 day! During this trial period, you are not locked out to some of the program main features like how many other programs behave when in trial mode. With BESR, you get the whole deal. Should you decide to actually keep the software, simply type in your product key to unlock and activate it. It’s that simple. For our hard drive migration scenario, 60 days is plenty enough to accomplish our goal. In fact, a few hours is usually enough!

I assume that you have already installed your new hard drive into your system. How to do so is beyond the scope of this article as I only cover how to perform the actual cloning process. Although the manual of BESR states that you do not have to format the destination hard drive beforehand, it doesn’t hurt to do so. I would suggest performing a quick format on your new hard drive prior to using BESR. Also it doesn’t hurt to scan your newly purchased hard drive for errors using HD Tune.
Although cloning a hard drive is relatively safe, it’s still a good rule of thumb to have a fresh backup of all your important data at hand should something go wrong. It does take time to create a fresh image of your computer but it’s always best to be safe than sorry. It’s kind of ironic to be creating a image backup prior to a clone because that’s pretty much exactly what cloning a hard drive is! You’re essentially creating a image of your original drive and then blasting that image onto another hard drive in the same system.

First things first, you’ll need to download and install the Symantec’s BESR trial software. You’ll need to click on the first link that points to the desktop edition. Once you have downloaded and extracted the files, head over to Install folder and double click Setup.exe to begin the straightforward installation. Don’t worry about all of the other extracted files. You will eventually come to the activation page where you are allowed to type in a product key to unlock the software out of trial mode. Simply select the Activate Later option.

Immediately after this, you’ll be asked whether you want to update the software and/or define your first backup job. Simply decline both options by unchecking them.

You will then be presented with the main interface of BESR. Don’t be intimated by it! Remember, we are only cloning our drive and so we wouldn’t be touching on any other features of the software. Click on the Tools menu button near the top and then select the Copy My Hard Drive option at the bottom.

Click Next on the initial screen. At the Source Drive screen, select the drive that you want to copy. In our scenario, this will be the C: drive as this is where our Windows partition, along with all of our other data, resides at. Remember, this is the source drive. In almost all hard drive migration cases, YOU SHOULD NOT SELECT YOUR NEW DRIVE AT THIS SCREEN!

At the Destination screen, you then select the disk that should receive the copied data from the source drive. In almost all cases, YOU NEED TO SELECT YOUR NEW DRIVE AT THIS SCREEN! Failing to do so can have devastating consequences because all data on the drive you select on this page will be erased!

In the Advanced Options page, we need to set a few important options. One of the biggest reason why I love using BESR to perform hard drive migrations is due to this Advance Options screen right here. The two options I will be checking is Set Drive Active, and Copy MBR. By setting the drive active, I am telling BESR to make my destination drive (the newer and bigger hard drive to which I am cloning to) the active disk. This allows the computer to boot from this hard disk. Copying the MBR to the destination drive allows the computer to learn about which partition to use for booting up Windows. By selecting these options, I am basically telling my computer to use my new hard drive as the main drive to boot Windows from after the cloning process has completed. To learn more about these or any of the other options, simply click on the Tell Me More Link.

I made a big mistake in enabling the ‘Disabling Smart Sector copying’ option! Smart Sector enables you to clone your hard drive much faster because it only copies the hard drive locations that actually contain data. By disabling this option, BESR will attempt to make a direct 1:1 copy and even clusters and sectors that have no data will be copied over. I know this sounds weird but in many cases, it’s best to just enable Smart Sector copying and not disable it unless you know what you are doing.

The next screen will present to you with a quick summary of the options you have selected. It doesn’t hurt to make sure that you have correctly specified the right source and destination drives along with the other options you have selected. Once you are absolutely, and I mean totally 100% sure that what you have selected is correct, you can then start the cloning process by hitting the Finish button and selecting YES at the warning prompt. The cloning process will then begin.
Notice the speed slider. You can adjust the performance of the BESR process by telling it how to use your computer resources. My recommendation is to just leave the slider alone (at Fast) and refrain from doing any intensive work on the computer until the cloning process has completed entirely. The time it takes to complete the copying process depends on how much data needs to be actually copied over and whether or not you disabled SmartSector copying. Obviously, the less data you have the faster the process will complete.

Once the process has completed, your destination drive should be an exact mirror of the source. When you restart your computer, you should now be presented with the dual boot screen asking you to select an operating system to boot into. Don’t worry as this is normal. Right now, the computer is a little bit confused because it detected that both hard drives have an operating system on it and so it doesn’t know which one to boot from.

In most cases, selecting the first option in the boot menu should get you to boot from your newer hard drive, although that’s not a given. There is one easy way to check whether you are booting from your new cloned hard drive or not. Once you see the Windows splash screen and the Windows log-in prompt, you’re in business. Once you are logged in, quickly head over to Computer and check your C: drive. If the hard drive space of drive C: consist of your new and larger hard drive space, then you’ll know that the migration has been successful. If it’s the same as before, than that means you’re still booting from your original hard drive. Reboot your computer and while in the dual boot menu, select the other option and check again. At this point, I would advise you to continue booting from your new hard drive while leaving your original drive intact. Check to make sure that all of your important documents and whatnot have successfully transferred over and that all of your installed programs function as before. Once you made sure that everything works as expected, you can proceed to delete the extra option in the boot menu along with reformatting your original drive to use as an extra data storage unit.

Editing Your Bootloader

We delete the extra boot option by editing our bootloader config file. This is just a simple text file that your computer looks at during the boot process to figure out how your hard drive is configured and where to look to boot into Windows. Editing the file manually is easy, provided that someone gives you the exact steps to edit the file and exactly what to delete from or add to the file. But why risk it? One wrong move and you’ll end up with a un-bootable system. Instead, we will use an awesome free utility built specifically to edit our bootloader file called EasyBCD.

You can download EasyBCD from here.

Run the program and click on the Edit Boot Menu button. Here, you should see two entries. These two entries represent what you just saw in the boot menu earlier. We want to remove/delete the additional entry, which points to our original drive, and to set the entry pointing to our new cloned drive as the default. Simply select the additional entry (make sure you are selecting the right one!) and click the Delete button. The one entry available should now be the default. If not, make sure to enable it and then hit the Save Settings button. Proceed to restart your system.

If the boot menu is still showing after the deletion, then simply head back to EasyBCD and enable the “Skip the boot menu” option near the bottom.

Now, restart your computer and if everything worked out, you shouldn’t see the boot menu and your computer will now be smart enough to automatically boot from your cloned drive from now on. If you are cloning either Windows Vista or Windows 7, you shouldn’t receive any errors. If you are cloning Windows XP, you might still be in trouble. If you experiencing problems, open up your computer and make your cloned drive as the first disk in the system. Basically, you’ll want to switch places with your original drive. You can do this by simply swapping cables to ensure that your original drive is now second in the chain (hd1) while your cloned drive is now the default first (hd0).

Reformatting Your Original Drive

Although a bigger hard disk has taken over as your primary hard drive in your system, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for additional drives! You can simply reformat your original drive and use it as an additional storage location for your other data. If there is physically nothing wrong with the drive, I don’t see why you should discard it besides wanting to sell it or using it in another system.
Simply use your favorite third party partitioning utility to reformat the drive or you can use Windows Disk Management to perform the feat for you. Right click Computer and select Manage from the menu option. Select Disk Management under Storage and you should then be presented with a layout of your hard disk and partitioning scheme. If you have only two physical drives in your system, then your original drive should now be labeled as Disk 1, with Disk 0 representing your cloned drive (assuming you have booted to the cloned hard disk). Therefore, right click on your original disk and select Format from the menu. Fill in the information and hit OK to perform the format.

If after the reformat you still don’t see the empty hard disk under Computer, head back to Disk Management, right click on the drive, and select the Change Drive Letter and Paths option. Click Add and select the desired drive letter for this hard disk.

 

In the End…

Using BESR made it really easy for me to help my friend clone his computer to a different hard disk. Two things that most impressed me was the speed of the cloning process and the advance options which allowed BESR to configure everything for me after the cloning has completed to make sure that I can use the new hard drive ASAP. True, it’s not everyday that you’ll need to migrate your Windows installation to a bigger hard disk but for times that you do, BESR can help you dramatically.

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