How to Copy an entire partition on Vista
With the DVD of Vista (or Vista installed on your PC) you can "clone" a partition on your hard drive. This can be very beneficial if you want to change your hard drive without having to reinstall everything without losing any data.
To begin, we need:
- your new drive is connected as a slave (if an IDE hard drive) or simply connected to the SATA hard disks or in USB and detected by Windows.
- free space on the destination partition is greater than or equal to the space of the partition source.
If Vista is not installed on your PC or you want to copy the partition on which Vista (or another operating system) is installed, it requires in addition that:
- you have a Vista DVD.
- your BIOS is configured to boot from the CD: Change the order of boot devices
- destination partition has the same properties as the source partition (file system, logical / extended and active / inactive) in case you want to copy a system partition (ie where an operating system is installed).
Re: How to Copy an entire partition on Vista
Vista is installed and you want to copy a partition other than Vista
- Type cmd in the Search bar menu and press start.
- In the window that opens, type ROBOCOPY X: \ Y: \ / e / efsraw / copyall / dcopy: t / r: 0 and click OK. (X and Y are the letters assigned to partitions, respectively, source and destination).
- Wait until it finishes and then close the window.
- Vista is not installed or you want to copy the partition on which Vista is installed
- Insert your Vista DVD.
- Restart your PC and press a button as soon as you are prompted.
- Wait until the end of the load, then click "Next"> "Windows Installer".
- When the window to introduce the Windows key appears, press SHIFT and F10, the command prompt will open.
- ROBOCOPY type X: \ Y: \ / e / efsraw / copyall / dcopy: t / r: 0 and click OK. (X and Y are the letters assigned to partitions, respectively, source and destination).
- Wait until the end of the operation, and repeat the trick (if necessary) to other partitions on the hard disk.
- Restart your PC. Please do not continue the installation process ;-)
- If necessary, unplug the old hard drive, and put the new in its place.
