Skip to main content

Transfer of old HDD to new "partition"?

Thread needs solution

Greetings! I have a situation that, I'm sure, someone here has either navigated before or simply knows how to, so I'm going to throw it out there in the hopes that I can get this fixed up...

I have a laptop that came with a 250GB HDD with Windows Vista pre-installed. I got to wanting to experiment with Windows 7, and so I took an old smaller HDD, pulled the Vista HDD out of the computer, and installed Windows 7 on the smaller one. It's getting to a point where I'd just like to have them both resident on one HDD, so I shrunk the Vista partition, leaving ample unallocated space to create a healthy new partition.

Having read around, I understand that True Image only clones at the disk level, and not at the partition level, but there is a way to transfer the information from the Win7 HDD to the newly-allocated partition on the original Vista HDD. I restored the backup of the Win7 drive to the new partition, but the problem is that I cannot get the system to recognize both partitions as independently bootable. I added the new partition using EasyBCD to try and get it to recognize it, and it gives me the option of booting into Windows 7, but it does not go through with the boot into 7 because it does not recognize the "winload.exe" file in \Windows\System32 as digitally signed (which, I guess, is a bit odd, but this overall difficulty is why I'm here).

Does anyone have a suggestion as to how to achieve what I'm looking to get done here? Perhaps I should start by asking whether or not it is feasible, THEN ask how best to go about it. I'd rather not go through a fresh ground-up install of Win7 on the new partition if I can avoid it.

Thank you!!

Jayson

0 Users found this helpful

According to this http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd363820(WS.10).aspx , you need to use your Win7 installation DVD to repair the startup of your computer.