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New hard disk

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I bought a new faster drive, which I would like to use as a system drive. I need to copy all the system files, applications and program data to the new drive. The problem is that I can't just clone the disk, because the new disk is smaller than the one I had.

I would like to clone the disk and specify a few folders which I would like to exclude. Is this possible? I could not find a direct way to do that. I tried making a backup of the selected folders, but it looks like it does not backup all the system files.

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You don't want to clone, you want to make a disk backup and then restore the backup to the new drive. YOu can restore to a diff size drive, even a smaller one, provided that the image is smaller than the space on the target drive. One of the options when ding a disk/partition restore is to restore to a diff size drive.

Your choice for the backup operation would a full disk/partition backup (select under My Computer rather than My Data). Make sure you have made a boot CD and use the bootCD to boot up to do the restore.

There are a couple of other ways to do this but this is the easiest and generaally the safest way. You will have the backup file even after the restore, so just in case anything goes wonky during the restore, you can try again becuse you will still have the backup file.

I have already tried disk backup, selected the whole drive under My Computer, excluded a few folders I don't need to copy, but when I did a restore on the new drive, there was a problem with booting windows. I fixed that with windows 7 boot cd and repair. But then I can not login into windows because there is a problem with user profiles. I think the program did not copy all the files I wanted.

What version are you using? I'd just backup the entire disk and not exclude anything. You can always selectively delete stuff after you restore. IF what you are excluding are jsut data files, it shouldn't have any impact on user rights.

Just curious, what kind of stuff are you excluding?

I'm using ATI Home 2010. I would like to backup the entire disk, but the new system disk does not have enough space, that is why I excluded the folder with photos and videos. This was just a data disk before and I loaded the system onto it, because the system disk died and it took a while until I got a replacement.

I know it shouldn't have any impact on user rights, but it simply did not work. It looks like something was missing.