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I am trying to figure out a feasible way to clone my entire C drive to another drive and make both bootable.

I have a 160GB HDD, on which I have created a 20GB primary partition and have installed Windows 7 on it. Now, I have another 500GB HDD, on which I have created a 63GB partition. Now, I want to clone my 20GB C drive to this 63GB partition.

My purpose of doing such a thing is simply to have a backup OS to boot from when my Windows 7 fails on any drive.

jonsca
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Timesking
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4 Answers4

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The simplest way would be by making a binary copy, you can do this with an ubuntu live disk and the dd command. Then use grub to chainload the boot menu from Windows. As suggested by kinokijuf you will not be able to browse the cloned copy, but it will be there on the other disk if you ever need your clone, just chainload the bootloader from your other disk.

  1. boot a linux livecd
  2. use dd if=/old-disk/<c partition> of=/new-disk/<newpartition>
  3. Install grub from your livedisk to MBR
Lucas Kauffman
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How about Ghost? Hiren's 10.4 is your friend. Extremely easy to do with Ghost.

OG Chuck Low
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No, it's not possible. Windows doesn't allow two disks with the same signature.

kinokijuf
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You can use Windows 7's in-built Backup to do what you suggest in your comment to kinokijuf (image to the other disk and then restore from it during a reisntall).

You can find more info about it in Windows Help (F1), or on Microsoft's site.

You can also setup a RAID1 (mirror) to accomplish having a second disk to keep using, if the one fails.

Depending on you motherboard, it may support this at the firmware/BIOS level. Or you can setup a software-level one in Windows 7 (if you have a version that supports it).

Note: RAID1 is intended for redundancy (fault tolerance), not backup. :)

Community
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Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
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