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Help creating bootable image

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I am in need of some assistance if someone could explain the procedure to me...

I am in the process of upgrading the hard drive in my laptop from a 200GB to a 500GB drive. I purchased a brand new unformatted drive and want to basically make a duplicate bootable drive so I can just swap it out and boot up.

I have attempted to do this by going using the clone feature, It took about 2 hours to finish. I swapped out the drive, tried to boot, and got the error 'bootmgr is missing' and I cannot continue.

I know I am probably missing some steps here, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

This is on windows vista sp1, drive is SATA.

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Try the procedure referred to as a "reverse" clone.

Remove the old drive and place it in an alternate location.
Install the blank target into its intended boot position where original was removed.
Boot from the user created TI Rescue/Recover/bootable media.
Use the Add disk option to delete the partitions added by the first clone.
Perform the clone (manual mode suggested) to the blank 500Gand shutdown when completed.
Disconnect the original drive and reboot.
The first reboot following the clone is to have only the new disk attached.

It should be noted that most of the regular forum contributers prefer to use the Backup/restore method (rather than Cloning) when moving to a new larger drive. In theory, there should be no risk to the source drive during cloning as the disk is only read. In practice, however, there has been far too many postings of something going wrong during the process. Sometimes it is the operator choosing the wrong disk and cloning the blank onto the master; other times, the power fails during the process; at other times, the computer freezes and the the drive is lost. Simply stated, why take the risk of cloning when it takes just a little more time to perform a disk option backup (all partitions) so a restore can be performed and the master disk is not even connected.