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I want to move data between two laptops. The source is a dying windows 7 machine, with one partition being windows 7, and one partition being user data.

The destination is a donated, older laptop, currently running vista. However, it has a few programs that we might want to use. The 7 setup of course has everything we are using.

My goal is to make a new partition on the new laptop, and copy the windows 7 install from the old system partition, and then move the user data from the old user partition.

Both source partitions are "large" but mostly empty. Shrinking partitions has so far been "pointless", even turning off system restore, hibernation, etc -- I'm concerned that the unmovable master file is blocking any attempt to shrink it more.

So two real questions:

  1. How do I transfer the file contents of a partition with no loss of data/meta data (nb: includes symbolic and hard links!), when the destination partition is smaller, and
  2. Once I have the 7 partition moved over, how do I tell the system that this is now the boot partition.

Both laptops, naturally, only have "restore to factory distribution state" options.

Keybounce
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1 Answers1

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You should review the answers in How to shrink Windows 7 boot partition with unmovable files as most of the options you can try are listed there.

Personally I've successfully used Gparted live CD and clonezilla live CD to move the same windows installation between hard drives.

Community
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Alec Istomin
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