Preston,

You can make an image of the partition using the Easus Easy Backup software at the same site you get the partition master at. I routinely make an image of my boot drive. On the one occasion when I lost the hard drive, I was back up in a half an hour after installing a new hard drive. I think everyone should keep an image of their boot drive with a known good configuration. It beats the hell out of a OEM recovery disk.

Geo

Again, Geo beat me to the punch. Good job!!! I like creating images of my OS when I am done too. Makes for a VERY quick recovery. If you plan ahead and create a balance. Small enough to operate easily and large enough to accept updates in the future without having to go though the resizing issue.

I would also STRONGLY recommend an external drive. You can unplug it and insure you will not overwrite sensitive data. 1 TB are often under $100.00 these days at places like Costco or similar membership club stores.

It makes image work a worry free breeze.

Roman

I am deep in the middle of this. My cat chewed thru 3x2Tb external drive power adapters , 4 USB cables, my home phone line, and my speaker cables over the weekend. Once I started taking things apart I decided to just spend the next days getting it all right. First I have downloaded and bought the partition software. Then I cloned the dual boot system drive to a 1tb MyBook. WhiLe that was going on (7 hours), I drove over to MicroCenter and got a 2TB extreme barracuda internal, and a USB 3.0 drive enclosure. I'm in the middle of cloning the system drive again to the new 2tb drive. Then I plan to try to just swap it for the system drive and see what happens. Meanwhile, the cat is in timeout.

Ok, so just responded to your note and noticed you had the exact same response here.

I am going to propose you do something very different than you have laid out.

I need an inventory of all available hardware.

How many usable hard drives. Internal vs. external. Sizes, and what is new and what is used. Used ones I need to know what is on them.

Roman

Roman, what is your recommendation?

I've pulled everything off the system except for my original system drive (500gb, dual boot), my working drive (images and data), and the new 2TB drive attached US3.0 (currently with an image of the system drive with the W7 partition extended to 1.5TB).

Do you care to go to phone mode this evening? This is pretty involved and have lots of questions. Would like to strategize with you. This notes back and fourth is kinda tough on such a technical job.

If so let me know your phone number and when (and what time zone) to contact you.

Roman

Yes, thank you...pm sent.

I would really like to hear about the final setup, how each element is set up and why. Pretty please.

Diana

OK, here is the saga up until now.

I have tried and failed four times to clone the system drive and boot a new bigger drive using the Easeus software. Each cloning took about 8 hours for a 500GB drive <sigh>. I then purchased the Easeus Backup Workstation software and tried another cloning with it, another 8 hours and another failure to boot. Then I used same software to do a Backup rather than a Clone. At that point I felt comfortable using the nuclear option that Roman recommended which was to use the Partition software to resize the system drive in place on the original drive. First I shrunk the Vista drive (D) of most of its free space, a 4 hour operation, then I allocated the 100gb to the Windows 7 drive (C), a 6 hour operation. That just finished...AND IT WORKED!!!

Now I have removed the somewhat healthy resized system drive and I am using the Easeus Recovery program to attempt to build a new system drive on a 2TB platform. It says it will take 7 hours for that. If it works I will have a new system drive with plenty of space, and I'll set the 500gb drive in the safe for any future potential recovery.

Preston,

I admire your tenacity. I have been using the Easus software for about a year with both XP and Win7 and it has always worked without a hitch. I always use the backup (not the clone) to make an image of my boot drive of 150 gb. It takes about 20 min. I actually made a backup last night that took 19 min. The one time I had to restore the partition to a new drive also took about 30 min. The other nice thing about the backup is it only makes an image of the used space. I think it may even do some compression because my 150 Gb partition of which 95 is supposedly used, gives me a backup file of 87 Gb. I have never tried the "clone" option. I can see where that might take longer if it is doing a sector by sector dupe.

My primary hard drive is a 1Tb drive with a 150Gb C: partition for the operating system (OS) and programs and a second D: partition for data. I've always believed it is a good idea to keep the operating system and data separate so that if the OS goes south it is easy to restore the C: partition without bothering the data partition. I would think with a duel boot config you could make a C: and D: partition for the 2 OSs and an E: partition for data. I can't believe it would take more that 150-200 Gb for OS and programs.

My systems are all Windows and use NTSF formatted drives. I'm wondering if your duel boot configuration uses a different disk format which may be the reason things are not going so smoothly?

Hope this helps and good luck getting your system back up.

Geo