Can I clone a 2nd partition as a boot drive?

[mrrman]

I have installed XP on 1 partition 1st and have Win 7 on a 2nd partition. I want to know if I can clone the Win 7 partition to a new hard drive and boot off that. I guess I would use Acronis or any other program that would do this. Thanks

[jolancer]

I never tried, I did come across imformation relating to such an issue though in the past while searching for something else. Its refering to XP not win7, but I assume the proccess would be similar IF not more difficault, because thats what microsoft does LOL? In this instance though i wouldnt blame them for copyright reasons.

So me not being any pro, but am familiar with some of the info, my guess would be... Yeah its probably possible, but also Probably Way more work then its worth LoL

The links bellow have information but for XP, it will give you a google starting point anyway if you choose to try. You'l have to do some of it in reverse though i think because your moving it from Partition2 to 1, however your OS Bootsector is still located on partition1 so Partition2 wont boot on its own without premodifying boot.cfg ,also your going to have a hole slew of other issuse if its even possible, if you doing this to try and boot it from a different system because windows activation locks itself to your hardware. If you try, and you get it working let me know how you did it

http://edoceo.com/exemplar/ntfsclone-transfer-windows
http://www.dominok.net/en/it/en.it.clonexp.html

[Charlie98]

Acronis clones to the entire disk, so no. (Unless I'm doing it wrong, someone correct me if that's so.) The way I understand it, say you are cloning a 500GB drive to another 500GB drive, it images the entire 500GB to the new disk wether it's full or not, regardless of partitions on the new disk. I don't know about different sized disks (i.e.: 500GB to 1TB.)