Sunday, January 4, 2015

windows 7 - Will Win7 Hidden Install Partition Still Work After Cloning and Restoring to a New Hard Drive


I have a laptop with Windows 7 whose hard drive is failing. There is no install disk and a fresh install is done via the bios and a hidden partition containing the Win7 install files.


I'd like to make an image of the drive with Clonezilla, then restore it to a new larger hard drive ( maybe expanding the current partitions to fill the new drive ) and then perform a fresh install.


Will this work? Does the bios restore program usually look at a particular disk address, or is it usually smart enough to look for a particular partition via the partition table at the beginning of the disk?


Answer



Yes i have done it numerous times for clients, but make sure the hard disk is the same size or you will run into problems especially if the drive is smaller than the source. As for expanding you will need to use Linux live CD the restore will only use the same size partition as the original


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