Is it possible to copy all Windows 7 files from one HD to another and boot from the new HD?

Solution 1:

There is a lot more to booting an operating system than simply having a bunch of files on the disk. There's a reserved bunch of blocks at the start of the disk that contain some special boot instructions which tell the computer how to boot.

If your old hard drive isn't dead yet... I would highly recommend you look at a tool like clonezilla or Symantec Ghost to clone your hard drive. It will correctly copy the special bits of the drive that are needed to boot, as well as resizing the volume to fill the entire disk.

Solution 2:

It's possible, but like the others have said, it involves more work. You need to set up a master boot record (MBR) to boot the disk, and set up the Windows boot loader to boot from that disk, using BCDEdit. It's by no means difficult, but you need to know what you're doing.

If you want to try it, follow these steps:

Set up the partition scheme you want. (Edit: Don't forget to mark the boot partition as active!)
Run BootSect.exe on the new hard disk. I think the program can be found in C:\Boot\BootSect.exe. Let's say your new drive (as an external drive at the moment) shows up as E: on your computer; type this into the command prompt:
```
C:\Boot\BootSect.exe /nt60 /mbr E:
```
Be especially careful to not accidentally do this to other drives!
Now copy all the files over to the new drive (E:), ensuring that you also copy hidden and system files.

Now use BCDEdit to fix the device and osdevice members of the E:\Boot\BCD file. You need to type in something like:

BCDEdit /store E:\Boot\BCD
Echo  Your boot entries are now printed. Copy the correct GUID.
BCDEdit /store E:\Boot\BCD /set {YOUR-GUID}   device partition=E:
BCDEdit /store E:\Boot\BCD /set {YOUR-GUID} osdevice partition=E:

Your volume should now be bootable.

Solution 3:

There is an awful lot more to booting a disk than just having some files on it.

The disk must be prepared properly. It requires certain data to exist in certain places of the drive. Namely, the boot sector and boot loader.

The computer by itself is incapable of loading windows. All it is capable of loading is 512 bytes from the very beginning (block 0) of the hard drive.

This is called the "boot sector". This data is read and then executed as a small program. It is then up to this program to then load the "boot loader" - more advanced than the boot sector, but still along way from windows.

It is then the job of this boot loader to start booting windows.

When you install windows all these things are put in place automatically. They do not get copied over with the files when you copy them from one disk to another.

You will need to reinstall windows afresh on the new drive, and then copy your data across from the old drive. Just copy the data - not windows or your programs (they will need reinstalling from scratch again).

Solution 4:

You are best to "clone" the old hard drive to the new one, then all you may need to do once the new Drive is installed is to do a startup repair to get it booting again.

Use this Free Software to clone the Western Digital drive

Solution 5:

would this help, is vista and 7 based on the same? asuming your drive is setup correctly boot secter. heres how to tie in the bootloader.
neosmart easy bcd says

http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD

Step Four: Nuclear Holocaust