Copying Boot Partition to Another Drive

[dmw16]

When I setup my computer I grossly underestimated the amount of space I'd need on my boot/OS/software drive. I'd like to get a 2nd drive, copy my entire OS partition over to it and be able to boot from it. Then I'd like to reclaim the space on my current drive and just lump it into storge partition.

So here are my questions:

1 - How can I copy my current OS partition onto a new drive and make it bootable and also increase the size of it? What I mean is, I want to copy the contents to a larger partition.

2 - How can I take the partition that is currently my OS partition and just lump it back into the storage partition without losing data?

3 - Or am I just screwed and need to start over 🙂

 

[dmw16]

It just occured to me that it might be easier to just increase the size of my boot partition after migrating the contents of my storage drive over to a 2nd drive.

 

[MChim]

Personally I would just start over. Once you start messing with that you could get random blue screens and such. It won't be exactly a clean install. From experience toying with boot records it can get a little messy.

 

[dmw16]

I kinda figured. I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to backup and reformat/reinstall.

I didn't realize how much software I'd end up installing 🙂

 

[RebateMonger]

Most every imaging/backup software will allow you to restore to a LARGER partition. I've migrated my PCs to larger hard drives a couple of times using Windows Home Server backup/restore, but there's lots of software that will do it.

If you want to MERGE partitions (boot and data partitions), you'll have to copy your data into the new single partition after migrating your boot partition.

 

[myocardia]

Acronis True Image would work well in your situation. It's $40 @ newegg, but if you were going to be buying a Seagate drive as your new drive, you can download an older version of the program for free from this page. I've been using Acronis for a few years, and it works well.