Clear a hard-drive, copy another onto it, then clear that other drive

October 24, 2009 7:41 PM

Looking for step by step instructions on how to clear a hard drive and then copy one drive (that boots Windows 7) to that drive I just cleared, then clear the old boot drive.

My case currently has two drives, one connected by SATA and the other by PATA. Though this wasn't my intention, when I upgraded from Vista 32-bit to Windows 7 64-bit my old boot drive, the SATA one, was left untouched and the new OS was installed on the PATA drive.

I would really like to switch things around so the SATA drive is the boot drive and the PATA one is secondary, like it used to be. This is because the PATA one is a lot older than the SATA one. Everything on the SATA drive (the secondary one at the moment) is expendable and I'd like to clear that and then copy the currently bootable PATA one to the SATA drive and then clear it, resulting in the SATA drive being the primary one and the PATA being a big blank secondary drive.

I know next to nothing about this kind of thing, so I would be eternally grateful if someone could point me to the software I need to be able to do this and how I would set up this kind of operation on it. I've gotten a vague sense of how I should do this from other AskMes and a few howtos, but I'm not confidant yet that I could do it and nothing would go wrong.

Also, I'd much prefer if I could do this without buying any more hardware or software. I do have blank cds, dvds and a flash drive.

In a perfect world the solution would be to set things up, press go, and then walk away for a while until it's done, but yea, any help you can give me would make me super happy.

I can see the solution to this problem taking a bit more effort than some AskMes. If it does (or hell, even if it doesn't but you give me the information I need) I will e-mail you ten adorable pictures of bunnies as a thank-you gift.

posted by The Devil Tesla to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Wait, just so we're clear here: which drive has what installed on it?

Is this correct?

SATA - Master - Windows Vista
PATA - Slave - Windows 7
posted by aheckler at 7:55 PM on October 24

I've had good luck using a GParted Live CD for this sort of thing. You can use it to clone the partition on the PATA drive onto the SATA drive. You should be to change the boot order in the BIOS when you're done.
posted by yarmond at 8:18 PM on October 24

Is this correct?

That is right so far as the SATA drive is the one with Windows Vista and the PATA one has Windows 7. I didn't know what Master and Slave mean when it comes to hard drives until I read this WikiAnswers, and I'm not sure that designation applies for these hard drives since they are connected to the motherboard using different cables. I use BIOS to change the boot order when I mess with things like that.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 8:23 PM on October 24

Like yarmond says, you should be able to clone the partition using GParted. Just download and burn the iso to a disk, boot from it, it should be pretty straightforward. Click on the partition you want to copy, click on the drive you want to copy to, click paste, wait anywhere from 1-10 hours, and it should be done. (Other programs are faster than Gparted at this, but just run it overnight)

The only concern might be that depending on how different the two drives are, Windows 7 might think you've changed the system hardware and want to reactivate. I don't know if that's changed since XP though.
posted by JauntyFedora at 11:55 PM on October 24

Just download and burn the iso to a disk, boot from it, it should be pretty straightforward.

Hopefully it is, I'll mark that best answer once I've done that and it works.

Now, mefimail me your e-mail address for bunnies :).
posted by The Devil Tesla at 12:53 AM on October 25