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My technique for windows since vista has been : 1) Plug both disks into a host machine (or boot up off of a WinPE or WinRE disk). 2) Mount the source them as

My technique for windows since vista has been : 1) Plug both disks into a host machine (or boot up off of a WinPE or WinRE disk). 2) Mount the source them as D:\ in this example 3) Format the destination disk in diskpart and mount as E:\ (be sure to mark active and format as a primary partition) 4) Run robocopy D:\ E:\ /x /e /COPYALL /zb /r:1 /w:0 (or something similar 5) wait... 6) verify that the copy didn't miss anything 7) Run bootsect e:\ /nt60 8) Try to boot from the new drive, if it doesn't work then try 'bootmgr /rebuildbcd' and fixboot it's not sector level, but i don't think it really needs to be, just mirror at the file level and fix up the boot sector. I'm not sure if it is dangerous but it works for me and it doesn't need 3rd party tools.

csense 11y ago
If you put this on a blog, you could probably become the top Google result for how to copy a bootable Windows partition, and make tons of money from advertising. The last time I was able to make head or tail of the Windows bootloader was in XP, before they decided that plain text configuration files were too easy for users and they needed to obfuscate the interface by using binary blobs that you could only work with using a rather confusing, poorly documented tool.
- ethbro 11y ago
  As a MS note, I'll just point that copy begat xcopy begat robocopy (and now apparently Copy-Item in powershell). This sequence doesn't fill me with Windows cli tool confidence.
kogir 11y ago
I'm pretty sure that using this method will actually break the WinSxS component cache - it won't preserve hard links. It may appear to work, but you'll possibly have issues applying updates and service packs later on. For Vista, imagex (part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit, what you use to make official WinPE images), is really what you want. It'll be loads faster too: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749447(v=ws.10).aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749447(v=ws.10...

csense 11y ago

If you put this on a blog, you could probably become the top Google result for how to copy a bootable Windows partition, and make tons of money from advertising. The last time I was able to make head or tail of the Windows bootloader was in XP, before they decided that plain text configuration files were too easy for users and they needed to obfuscate the interface by using binary blobs that you could only work with using a rather confusing, poorly documented tool.

ethbro 11y ago
As a MS note, I'll just point that copy begat xcopy begat robocopy (and now apparently Copy-Item in powershell). This sequence doesn't fill me with Windows cli tool confidence.

kogir 11y ago

I'm pretty sure that using this method will actually break the WinSxS component cache - it won't preserve hard links. It may appear to work, but you'll possibly have issues applying updates and service packs later on. For Vista, imagex (part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit, what you use to make official WinPE images), is really what you want. It'll be loads faster too: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749447(v=ws.10).aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749447(v=ws.10...