How to upgrade a hard drive in place?

[kcbaltz]

[Edited 2/4 to remove colons after drive letters that were causing emoticons to appear]

I have a Win7 system with a 128GB SSD as my C drive and a 600GB D drive where my user profile data is stored (I have a junction from c\users to d\users). I want to replace the D drive with a 3TB drive and I'm having trouble figuring out how to do it.

I've got the contents of d: mirrored onto the 3TB (E), but I'm not sure how I can get E to be the new D. To complicate matters, the D drive used to be the C drive when this box was running WinXP, so I think Win7 still thinks it's some kind of system drive. In Disk Management, it shows up as (System, Active, Primary Partition).

I tried booting the system with the D drive disconnected with the thought that I would be able to then set the E drive as D, but it wouldn't even boot into windows and just hung during POST. I could image D and put the image on the 3TB, but then I think it would be a 600 GB image and I wouldn't be able to resize to 3TB, thanks to the GPT Disk requirement.

Any ideas?

 

[piasabird]

I would have taken all the drives out except E and just formatted it and installed win7 on it.

Win 7 is suppose to have a transfer program for copying the user data. I think it takes the user ID Profile and copies it to the new drive. I don't know how it would work in your case.

I would just start over with a clean install. If you got a lot of music and video you can just copy it later.

Probably not what you want to hear.

It really helps to store all files under "My Computer", even if you have to put it all in Sub Folders for storage and retrieval. That way all you have to do is target My Computer in My documents, My Pictures, etc.

 

[piasabird]

Another way to handle this is create a folder and make it shared and store everything in there so everyone can access it.

 

[mfenn]

You're not going to be able to change the drive letter of the drive that has your user profile on it while the system is running. There are just too many mandatory open files.

You'll definitely need to boot without the D drive connected as you tried to do. Where you got bit was that you probably had the D drive plugged in when you installed Windows 7 originally. The Windows installer then said "oh, there is a boot sector over there, let me just reuse that instead of making a new one". So now, your system needs both the C and D drives to boot.

You can fix this by booting from the Windows 7 installation media with JUST your C drive connected. Then go to the recovery command prompt, and type the following two commands:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

You should be able to boot into Windows after that. Here's a link with more details: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-to-manually-repair-windows-7-boot-loader-problems/

 

[kcbaltz]

Thanks, I was able to get the boot info moved by disconnecting all the drives except the SSD and using the Win7 disk to do Startup Repair.

Now I need to get the profiles moved from one drive to the next. I'm hoping I can either change the drive letters while they're mounted or, if not, change the junctions to point to the new drive.

 

[mfenn]

After cloning the Users directory with robocopy or whatever, you should be able to boot into the recovery mode command prompt (see link in previous post) and redo the junction with mklink.

 

[kcbaltz]

I was actually able to do this while Windows was running. Not sure how safe it was, but I took the old D, renamed it to an unused letter (e.g. Q), then renamed the new D to D and rebooted. It seems to be running OK, but I'm going to let it run a few days before I confirm I didn't lose anything from the old D drive.

 

[mfenn]

Cool, glad it worked out!