Newbie needs help! Clone Only One Partition to New Drive? Please!

I want to consolodate two os onto one drive using ATI 2009.

Computer A has 64-bit Vista Ultimate on its D partition and computer B has 32-bit Vista Ultimate on its C partition. Both are legal and registered to me.

How do I clone drive A's partition D onto B's partition D?

I cannot find a way to select partitions using ATI's clone disk. It seems to want to clone the entire disk - even in the mannual mode. Is there a way to clone a partition or do I need to do it some other way?

Please give me a step-by-step, if it is not as easy as just selecting the partitions in clone disk.

BTW: I do have a USB to sata dock or I can put both drives into one computer temporarily.

Thank you.

Les
Thank you in advance.

 

You need to do an "image backup" of each partition seperately. Do an image backup "my computer" of your computer A (partition D) and save it onto your external drive.

Next restore that image backup onto computer B (partition D). That should do it. That's the easy part, now the hard part is making sure you can get both to bootup and edit the boot loader.

Just remember not to do any clones, that only applys if you want to do entire hard drive to hard drive copy. All you want to do is a simple single "partition" backup and restoration.

 

Thank you.

What about the MBR? Should I copy that or will it wipe out mthe other os's mbr?

Do I need to have ATI on both computers? I did that.

 

The image restore did not work well. I fixed the missing boot and used a recovery disk. However, it originally said it could not use Run.dll32 because of insufficient user privileges.

Then it says that it could not open windows because MSOE.Dll was missing.

What did I do wrong?

Should I have copied MBR?

 

If you only restored the image of A's D partition to the D partition on B, B should still boot normally. If it doesn't then you messed up the Vista 32 boot files on B. If you restored the MBR from A, then it might boot into Vista 64, but you wouldn't be able to run Vista 32.

There are other problems:

First, Vista 64 was installed for the hardware of computer A and you want to restore it to computer B with different hardware.

You may get this to work if you first set the display driver to plain VGA and after restoring that image to the D partition of B, you can set it to B's video card.

Second, Vista on B was set up as a single boot system, now you want it to boot both versions of Vista.

This requires editing the Vista boot files. Google the subject, get a free editior and try to make it work.

You may not get this sorted out before Windows 7 comes out.

 

1. It does
2. I did not do that
3. No problem there. I cloned B to A before I upgraded 32 bit to Ultimate on B and Installed the 64-bit Ultimate on A. no problems other than having to get new drivers for the hardware change and changing the manufacturer info in the registry.
4. I already loaded in a boot manager on A, which is already a dual boot system with Vista home premium 32 and Ultimate 64.

I think what I need to do is to clone ultimate 32 from B to a 3rd hard disk and ultimate 64 to a fourth. then install them as second drives on a and b, respectively. When these work, I will delete the Vista home premium on A. Then I should have both OS on both computers.

Is that the best way to do it?

 

When you cloned B to A, did you have to reactivate Windows 32-bit on A? Unless the hardware is almost identical I would expect a reactivation to be required.

If that is correct, then you will have to activate each version of Windows on each computer. That will present a problem since Windows only allows one activation unless you have corporate versions.

When you change drives, you would have to change the boot files to point to the new drives to make this work. That seems to be a lot of work that's not necessary.

Why not simply upgrade the Home Premium 32 on A to Ultimate 32 on A. Then you have both versions of Windows that you want on A in a dual boot arrangement that works.

Clone the hard drive of A to the hard drive of B, and then B will have both operating systems and the dual boot already set up. (Cloning is only for an entire drive, all partitions, and that is just what you want in this case.)

Windows activation may be a problem, but you can decide what to do about that at that time.