Moving OS to another drive that's not empty
Hello,
My 32gb SSD, which contains windows 7 and some other programs, appears to be failing. I have made an image of the whole drive with true image western digital edition. Recovering the image to the ssd allows me to boot into windows, but the disk read error keeps coming back.
Anyways, I also have a 1tb hard drive (only has one big partition) for storage and another 232gb hard drive for backups and such. I'd like to clone the operating system onto the 1tb hard drive as a new partition that would replace the ssd without having to erase the data that is already there. I was wondering if this is possible, since the cloning/recovery options in the startup manager ask me to erase the destination hard drive.
If it's not possible, I could use the 232gb hard drive but I'd prefer to use the faster 1tb drive. I read the manual of course but I've never dealt with recovering images and moving operating systems and I want to be 100% sure, so I'm sorry if this is a silly question.
Thanks.
Matti,
The disk error from the old SSD could have been transferred to the new SSD. Check the new SSD for disk errors before trying a second choice.
Matti,
The disk error from the old SSD could have been transferred to the new SSD. Check the new SSD for disk errors before trying a second choice.
Indeed, I'm still trying easier options like fixing MRB.. windows repair, chkdsk, checking cables and so on but I wanted to be sure my backup plan works in case the drive fails altogether.
You can't. Assuming that you have another backup of 1TB drive content, you may try to decrease its only partition size using W7 disk management, restore the image to the free space... but you will end up with the bootable partition in the 'upper' part of the drive that, afaik, can't be moved , merged or resized further using W7 built-in utils. Merging the two partitions, keeping the resulting one bootable might be possible using Disk Director 11 .
I see. I was afraid it works something like this. This seems to be a bit out of my league so I'll just use the other hard drive if it comes to that. I'll keep this in mind though.
Thanks.
Using DD, you could easily resize the partition on the 1TB drive smaller from the left side and place the Windows 7 partition at the start (on the fast part of the drive). You could also do it with TI by backing up the partition on the 1TB drive, deleting the partition, restoring the Windows 7 partition, and finally restoring the 1TB image. There are other ways too, but you should have the general idea.
What type of error are you getting? Is it an actual "read" error or is it a file system error caused by some type of corruption? The reason I ask is because recently I was helping someone with the problem of file corruption happening after restoring a TI image. It would work fine for a while and then develop problems. In this case, the corruption was in the image and was being restored with it. chkdsk was not able to fix the problem (it though everything was okay).
It's most commonly a disk read error when the system is cold booted. After recovering the image, the OS boots normally and appears to work ok although all the intensive programs are run off the hard drives. Sometimes it starts loading the OS but gets stuck at the loading screen with the HD activity light constantly lit up. There was one time during POST that the SSD gave a SMART error which makes me think the problem is more than just corruption even though it's very possible that the image itself has been corrupted. Another time during startup it said no OS detected. Chkdsk doesn't find any problems but the windows recovery appears to be fixing something when I use it after a disk read error.