Will B & R 2011 Free do this?

Greetings all,

I apologize in advance for not doing more research, but I'm getting lost in the ozone on this forum. I have the following situation:

Current 500Gb HDD has a dual boot configuration with XP and Win7 Ultimate 64 - it's partitioned as follows:

78Gb XP Pro
78Gb Win7 Ultimate 64
340Gb Data

I no longer need/want the XP partition, so I would like to copy the Win7 partition to another drive and make it bootable, keeping the current drive as is in case of problems with the new drive. Is it possible to do this with B & R? If so, what's the best procedure? Thank you.

JT01

 

I am a relatively new Paragon user but what you want to do is what these programs are intended to do. So, yes, you can do it. I think the only wrinkle is that since you don't want the XP partition and the existing drive has the MBR setup for a dual-boot you don't want that MBR to be restored.

Paragon apparently has the facility for writing a "generic" MBR - see page 65 in the user guide.

You need to make an image of your W7 partition. Do you also have the 100MB system reserved partition too? If so, include it in the image. Check which partition is marked active since you need to have an active partition but you probably know this.

Write the Paragon generic MBR to the disk and restore the image. Hopefully it will boot.

Another way that is probably a bit more work is to format your new disk with the W7 installation DVD. This will setup the MBR and mark the partition active. After the partitioning etc is done and the installation routine is copying files stop the install. You can just reset the machine to stop it.

Now take the prepared new disk and restore your W7 partition to it.

For new disks I actually like doing the second way because I do the slow format on the disk which does a read-check of all the sectors. Gives some confidence the new disk is working well but it does take a lot of time with todays large disks.

 

Thanks very much for the reply. I intend to start tjhe process this weekend, so will download and install B & R and get to it. I wondered about being able to restore a single partition and I think you answered the question. Will try method number 2 for partitioning and formatting the new disk, as you suggested. Thanks again.

 

Good luck. Fortunately you are in an ideal situation because you have your original disk in case somethng doesn't work. I would remove or at least disconnect the cables to it while you are doing the restore so there is zero chance of you getting the wrong disk.

On that note, be sure your partitions have meaningful labels so you can identify them. The Paragon recovery environment is Linux and the drive letters may be different from what they are in Windows but this gets sorted out when Windows boots up. It also isn't a bad idea to note the model number of the drive which is what you see in the BIOS so if you have more than one drive in the system and the booting isn't working you know you are trying to boot the right drive! DAMHIKT (Don't Ask Me How I Know That).

How are you restoring your data partition? I was fixated on your wanting to have only the W7 OS and didn't think of it. To expand on my usual method I usually setup the OS partition as described with the Windows Installation DVD and leave the rest as unallocated. After I get the new drive running Windows I use Windows Disk Management to setup the unallocated space into 1 or more partitions. Then with the old drive connected I just copy the data files and folders over with Windows Explorer.

You could do it by imaging the data partition and this now reminds me that I've never tried to selectively restore partitions from a backup containing multiple partitions using Paragon - I've only made a backup of a single partiton (which also includes the System Reserved 100MB partition) and restored it. I think I'd better see how this is done in Paragon for future reference!

 

Hello jt,

Assuming you had XP installed first:

1. Boot into your windows 7 partition

2. Open an elevated command prompt ( type cmd in start search box - when the little black box pops up - rt click it and Select Run As Admin )

At the prompt ( the arrow head > ), type:

bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

then press enter.

You should get a successful message.

3. Use Paragon to mark your windows 7 partition Active , and mark your XP partition Inactive ( you will get a warning it may make your system unbootable - go ahead anyway ).

4. Create and format a Primary partition on your other drive to copy win7 partition onto ( you can use win 7 disk mgmt or Paragon for that ).

5. Copy your win 7 partition with paragon.

6. Open elevated command again, type

bcdboot newpartitionletter:\windows /s newpartitionletter:

then press enter

7. If you want to delete the XP partition - you will need to reboot the pc before doing so.

[you don't normally need to do the above - it is only because you had xp installed first ]

[ If you want to boot from the other hard drive - you will need to mark the newly copied win7 partition Active and make sure it is the first HD in bios boot order.]