Copy partition to another partition?

I have two partitions on my hard drive: C about 80GB and D about 60 GB. At the moment partition C; is free and D has Vista installed on it.

I would like to transfer Vista to the larger partition and the idea seems to be to use Paragon disk manager to cope the entire vista partition to the larger one.

Easy so far, however what I am curious..worried about is how will the PC boot with two copies of vista on two seperate partitions. How do I make it boot from C

Many thanks for any tips

 

Hello,
firstly use paragon's clone option to clone the partition from one to the other.
paragon should add the entrie by itself. to be sure you could always run the "update mbr" option in the menu of paragon.
download and install easybcd and check to see what entries it has for the bootloader. it should have two one for D and one for C. you will may to move the C one to the top.
if you only want to boot from C: then delete the other entrie from the bootloader once you have verified it boots from C: fine.

if you have any questions feel free to ask.
it may be a good idea to post the screenshot of easybcd once you have cloned and updated MBR so i can check the entries for you.

 

You could just resize the partitions, if the sole reason for the change is to control the VISTA partitions' size.
Use Partition Manager Express (free).

 

@lodore

many thanks, i'll do as you suggest. If it all goes wrong, I'll be re-installing everything I suppose

I'll post a screenshot once I have done the clone

many thanks

 

@Rad

you are right, but the other reason is that I'd like Vista to be in the first partition of the hard drive, it's in the second now.

I had Win & installed in the first partition... a bad mistake to make, I guess

Thanks anyway

 

I don't think just simple cloning will work..... I mean, it will of course work but your C: partition will be labeled as D. So, when you update mbr and boot into your computer, your first partition will be D: and the second partition will be assigned C: or whatever alphabet is available.

It is because all the vista links/entries inside D partition can not be changed, so if you want to make vista bootable, you will need to label the partition as D

I may be wrong, but I am sure I am not.

 

Are you sure the C partition is completely empty, including no Vista bootloader files? Which partition is currently flagged as active? When you had a Windows OS on C, what were you using to select which OS was booting (if you had an OS on both drives simultaneously for any length of time)? To Raza's point, I would also think you have the issue with D: path references throughout your Vista install that will force you to continue to ensure that the partition on which Vista is located going forward gets assigned D:, if there are no other issues. I am not well versed in the Vista bootloader, still being an XP person, so I'm sure others can help more.

Doug

 

Well, you were all quite right, it didn't work, I had to install Vista from scratch...I learned something new anyway

It works now.

Many thanks for your help to all of you

Bernard