Cloning a dual boot drive

I hear the click of death coming from my HDD and am ready to replace it with a shiny new 0.5TB drive. Cloning the OS X partition over to an external drive and then cloning it back has been well covered here but I haven't seen mention of how to handle a dual booted machine.
Can the same tools (SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner) be used to clone the Windows partition as well? If not can I use DiskUtility to manage the transfer? Should I format the whole new drive as Mac OS Extended Journaled at first then go back and create a FAT32 partition to copy over the WIN image?
I have some old useful software on the WIN side that would be really difficult to find and install again and I'd rather not have to go through the trouble and for the same reason I don't want to go corrupting the WIN image with the wrong tools.
Thx

ottojar wrote:
Thanks for the suggestion Stefan, I'll give Winclone a try. I don't follow your logic on writing it to the OSX partition though, it seems like you're adding two extra data copying steps to the process vs. just creating and restoring the WIN image from the external HDD.
Hi ottojar,
reason for this is, that I don't have my external HD connected all the time and also that restoring from the internal HD is faster than from the external.
I start the SuperDuper cloning not on a regular basis, but rather before system updates and the like.
Cheers
You're welcome anytime. Hope it helps
Stefan

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Last edited by jones (2013-06-29 14:36:56)

First thing you should do is become familiar with your motherboard.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/manual.asp?Model=H67M
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I'm posting in both the W8 and W7 forums because I'm not sure which is more appropriate.
Setup:
New Dell XPS8700 with Windows 8.1 installed on a 256GB SSD drive. I upgraded to W8.1 Pro.
2nd drive is a 2TB SATA.
Goal:
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Install W7 Ultimate 64 (legal copy, installation disk) on SATA Drive.
Select which one I want at boot.
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Cannot easily choose which OS to log into. See Dual Boot Problems and Current State for details.
Background: W7 Installation Probems
1. I disabled Secure Boot in the BIOS and Fast Startup in Windows 8.1
2. I created 3 partitions (D, E, F) on the SATA drive (a GPT drive)
3. Used the Advanced Option in W8 to boot from the DVD (absurd),
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2. Downloaded and installed EasyBCD. Created boot menu for W8.1 and W7 with W8.1 the default.
3. Reboot, select W8. Fine, I'm into W8.1
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5. Do an F12 reboot and select legacy boot from the SATA drive. Get a different boot menu with Windows 7 on top and W8 Media version below. Select W7. It loads and I log in.
6. Do an F12 reboot and select legacy boot from the SATA drive. This time, select W8. Get an error that it can't find W8.
Current State
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I've been working on this for two weeks now, have read more articles, watched more YouTube videos than I care to list. Need Help Desperately.
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value="hy">Armenian</option><option value="az">Azerbaijani</option><option value="eu">Basque</option><option value="be">Belarusian</option><option value="bg">Bulgarian</option><option
value="ca">Catalan</option><option value="zh-CN">Chinese (Simplified)</option><option value="zh-TW">Chinese (Traditional)</option><option value="hr">Croatian</option><option
value="cs">Czech</option><option value="da">Danish</option><option selected="selected" value="auto">Detect language</option><option value="nl">Dutch</option><option
value="en">English</option><option value="et">Estonian</option><option value="tl">Filipino</option><option value="fi">Finnish</option><option value="fr">French</option><option
value="gl">Galician</option><option value="ka">Georgian</option><option value="de">German</option><option value="el">Greek</option><option value="ht">Haitian
Creole</option><option value="iw">Hebrew</option><option value="hi">Hindi</option><option value="hu">Hungarian</option><option value="is">Icelandic</option><option
value="id">Indonesian</option><option value="ga">Irish</option><option value="it">Italian</option><option value="ja">Japanese</option><option value="ko">Korean</option><option
value="la">Latin</option><option value="lv">Latvian</option><option value="lt">Lithuanian</option><option value="mk">Macedonian</option><option value="ms">Malay</option><option
value="mt">Maltese</option><option value="no">Norwegian</option><option value="fa">Persian</option><option value="pl">Polish</option><option value="pt">Portuguese</option><option
value="ro">Romanian</option><option value="ru">Russian</option><option value="sr">Serbian</option><option value="sk">Slovak</option><option value="sl">Slovenian</option><option
value="es">Spanish</option><option value="sw">Swahili</option><option value="sv">Swedish</option><option value="th">Thai</option><option value="tr">Turkish</option><option
value="uk">Ukrainian</option><option value="ur">Urdu</option><option value="vi">Vietnamese</option><option value="cy">Welsh</option><option value="yi">Yiddish</option></select>⇄<select><option
value="af">Afrikaans</option><option value="sq">Albanian</option><option value="ar">Arabic</option><option value="hy">Armenian</option><option value="az">Azerbaijani</option><option
value="eu">Basque</option><option value="be">Belarusian</option><option value="bg">Bulgarian</option><option value="ca">Catalan</option><option value="zh-CN">Chinese
(Simplified)</option><option value="zh-TW">Chinese (Traditional)</option><option value="hr">Croatian</option><option value="cs">Czech</option><option value="da">Danish</option><option
value="nl">Dutch</option><option selected="selected" value="en">English</option><option value="et">Estonian</option><option value="tl">Filipino</option><option
value="fi">Finnish</option><option value="fr">French</option><option value="gl">Galician</option><option value="ka">Georgian</option><option value="de">German</option><option
value="el">Greek</option><option value="ht">Haitian Creole</option><option value="iw">Hebrew</option><option value="hi">Hindi</option><option value="hu">Hungarian</option><option
value="is">Icelandic</option><option value="id">Indonesian</option><option value="ga">Irish</option><option value="it">Italian</option><option value="ja">Japanese</option><option
value="ko">Korean</option><option value="la">Latin</option><option value="lv">Latvian</option><option value="lt">Lithuanian</option><option value="mk">Macedonian</option><option
value="ms">Malay</option><option value="mt">Maltese</option><option value="no">Norwegian</option><option value="fa">Persian</option><option value="pl">Polish</option><option
value="pt">Portuguese</option><option value="ro">Romanian</option><option value="ru">Russian</option><option value="sr">Serbian</option><option value="sk">Slovak</option><option
value="sl">Slovenian</option><option value="es">Spanish</option><option value="sw">Swahili</option><option value="sv">Swedish</option><option value="th">Thai</option><option
value="tr">Turkish</option><option value="uk">Ukrainian</option><option value="ur">Urdu</option><option value="vi">Vietnamese</option><option value="cy">Welsh</option><option
value="yi">Yiddish</option></select>
English (auto-detected) » English

SOLUTION:
The problem I described above stemmed from the fact that I had been unable to install W7 without using the legacy option. (The W7 installation would freeze at the first screen.) That created the boot incompatibilities between W8.1 and W7because I had
to use legacy for the latter but not for the former.
It turned out that the USB ports were the basic problem. The Windows 7 installation program doesn't recognize USB 3.0 ports. Unfortunately, the A08 BIOS in the XPS 8700 -Special Edition (as of late Dec. 2014) has only 3 options for enabling/disabling
the USB ports: Front, Top, Back. The back panel has a mix of USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports and I needed a 2.0 port for the mouse and keyboard to work. However, disabling the Front and Top USB ports was sufficient. The W7 install no longer froze.
So, from my W8 installation, I wiped out the SATA drive, changed it back to GPT, partitioned it, disabled the Front and Top USB ports in the BIOS and booted from the W7 DVD. The installation went fine. After installing the network driver, downloaded
previously, and updating W7, I installed the USB 3.0 drivers and then re-enabled the Top and Front in the BIOS.
So, now the EasyBCD boot options work just fine. Both drives are GPT. No legacy options.
<textarea style="height:80px;width:444px;border:1px solid grey;padding:2px;"></textarea><select><option value="af">Afrikaans</option><option value="sq">Albanian</option><option value="ar">Arabic</option><option
value="hy">Armenian</option><option value="az">Azerbaijani</option><option value="eu">Basque</option><option value="be">Belarusian</option><option value="bg">Bulgarian</option><option
value="ca">Catalan</option><option value="zh-CN">Chinese (Simplified)</option><option value="zh-TW">Chinese (Traditional)</option><option value="hr">Croatian</option><option
value="cs">Czech</option><option value="da">Danish</option><option selected="selected" value="auto">Detect language</option><option value="nl">Dutch</option><option
value="en">English</option><option value="et">Estonian</option><option value="tl">Filipino</option><option value="fi">Finnish</option><option value="fr">French</option><option
value="gl">Galician</option><option value="ka">Georgian</option><option value="de">German</option><option value="el">Greek</option><option value="ht">Haitian
Creole</option><option value="iw">Hebrew</option><option value="hi">Hindi</option><option value="hu">Hungarian</option><option value="is">Icelandic</option><option
value="id">Indonesian</option><option value="ga">Irish</option><option value="it">Italian</option><option value="ja">Japanese</option><option value="ko">Korean</option><option
value="la">Latin</option><option value="lv">Latvian</option><option value="lt">Lithuanian</option><option value="mk">Macedonian</option><option value="ms">Malay</option><option
value="mt">Maltese</option><option value="no">Norwegian</option><option value="fa">Persian</option><option value="pl">Polish</option><option value="pt">Portuguese</option><option
value="ro">Romanian</option><option value="ru">Russian</option><option value="sr">Serbian</option><option value="sk">Slovak</option><option value="sl">Slovenian</option><option
value="es">Spanish</option><option value="sw">Swahili</option><option value="sv">Swedish</option><option value="th">Thai</option><option value="tr">Turkish</option><option
value="uk">Ukrainian</option><option value="ur">Urdu</option><option value="vi">Vietnamese</option><option value="cy">Welsh</option><option value="yi">Yiddish</option></select>⇄<select><option
value="af">Afrikaans</option><option value="sq">Albanian</option><option value="ar">Arabic</option><option value="hy">Armenian</option><option value="az">Azerbaijani</option><option
value="eu">Basque</option><option value="be">Belarusian</option><option value="bg">Bulgarian</option><option value="ca">Catalan</option><option value="zh-CN">Chinese
(Simplified)</option><option value="zh-TW">Chinese (Traditional)</option><option value="hr">Croatian</option><option value="cs">Czech</option><option value="da">Danish</option><option
value="nl">Dutch</option><option selected="selected" value="en">English</option><option value="et">Estonian</option><option value="tl">Filipino</option><option
value="fi">Finnish</option><option value="fr">French</option><option value="gl">Galician</option><option value="ka">Georgian</option><option value="de">German</option><option
value="el">Greek</option><option value="ht">Haitian Creole</option><option value="iw">Hebrew</option><option value="hi">Hindi</option><option value="hu">Hungarian</option><option
value="is">Icelandic</option><option value="id">Indonesian</option><option value="ga">Irish</option><option value="it">Italian</option><option value="ja">Japanese</option><option
value="ko">Korean</option><option value="la">Latin</option><option value="lv">Latvian</option><option value="lt">Lithuanian</option><option value="mk">Macedonian</option><option
value="ms">Malay</option><option value="mt">Maltese</option><option value="no">Norwegian</option><option value="fa">Persian</option><option value="pl">Polish</option><option
value="pt">Portuguese</option><option value="ro">Romanian</option><option value="ru">Russian</option><option value="sr">Serbian</option><option value="sk">Slovak</option><option
value="sl">Slovenian</option><option value="es">Spanish</option><option value="sw">Swahili</option><option value="sv">Swedish</option><option value="th">Thai</option><option
value="tr">Turkish</option><option value="uk">Ukrainian</option><option value="ur">Urdu</option><option value="vi">Vietnamese</option><option value="cy">Welsh</option><option
value="yi">Yiddish</option></select>
English (auto-detected) » English
<textarea style="height:80px;width:444px;border:1px solid grey;padding:2px;"></textarea><select><option value="af">Afrikaans</option><option value="sq">Albanian</option><option value="ar">Arabic</option><option
value="hy">Armenian</option><option value="az">Azerbaijani</option><option value="eu">Basque</option><option value="be">Belarusian</option><option value="bg">Bulgarian</option><option
value="ca">Catalan</option><option value="zh-CN">Chinese (Simplified)</option><option value="zh-TW">Chinese (Traditional)</option><option value="hr">Croatian</option><option
value="cs">Czech</option><option value="da">Danish</option><option selected="selected" value="auto">Detect language</option><option value="nl">Dutch</option><option
value="en">English</option><option value="et">Estonian</option><option value="tl">Filipino</option><option value="fi">Finnish</option><option value="fr">French</option><option
value="gl">Galician</option><option value="ka">Georgian</option><option value="de">German</option><option value="el">Greek</option><option value="ht">Haitian
Creole</option><option value="iw">Hebrew</option><option value="hi">Hindi</option><option value="hu">Hungarian</option><option value="is">Icelandic</option><option
value="id">Indonesian</option><option value="ga">Irish</option><option value="it">Italian</option><option value="ja">Japanese</option><option value="ko">Korean</option><option
value="la">Latin</option><option value="lv">Latvian</option><option value="lt">Lithuanian</option><option value="mk">Macedonian</option><option value="ms">Malay</option><option
value="mt">Maltese</option><option value="no">Norwegian</option><option value="fa">Persian</option><option value="pl">Polish</option><option value="pt">Portuguese</option><option
value="ro">Romanian</option><option value="ru">Russian</option><option value="sr">Serbian</option><option value="sk">Slovak</option><option value="sl">Slovenian</option><option
value="es">Spanish</option><option value="sw">Swahili</option><option value="sv">Swedish</option><option value="th">Thai</option><option value="tr">Turkish</option><option
value="uk">Ukrainian</option><option value="ur">Urdu</option><option value="vi">Vietnamese</option><option value="cy">Welsh</option><option value="yi">Yiddish</option></select>⇄<select><option
value="af">Afrikaans</option><option value="sq">Albanian</option><option value="ar">Arabic</option><option value="hy">Armenian</option><option value="az">Azerbaijani</option><option
value="eu">Basque</option><option value="be">Belarusian</option><option value="bg">Bulgarian</option><option value="ca">Catalan</option><option value="zh-CN">Chinese
(Simplified)</option><option value="zh-TW">Chinese (Traditional)</option><option value="hr">Croatian</option><option value="cs">Czech</option><option value="da">Danish</option><option
value="nl">Dutch</option><option selected="selected" value="en">English</option><option value="et">Estonian</option><option value="tl">Filipino</option><option
value="fi">Finnish</option><option value="fr">French</option><option value="gl">Galician</option><option value="ka">Georgian</option><option value="de">German</option><option
value="el">Greek</option><option value="ht">Haitian Creole</option><option value="iw">Hebrew</option><option value="hi">Hindi</option><option value="hu">Hungarian</option><option
value="is">Icelandic</option><option value="id">Indonesian</option><option value="ga">Irish</option><option value="it">Italian</option><option value="ja">Japanese</option><option
value="ko">Korean</option><option value="la">Latin</option><option value="lv">Latvian</option><option value="lt">Lithuanian</option><option value="mk">Macedonian</option><option
value="ms">Malay</option><option value="mt">Maltese</option><option value="no">Norwegian</option><option value="fa">Persian</option><option value="pl">Polish</option><option
value="pt">Portuguese</option><option value="ro">Romanian</option><option value="ru">Russian</option><option value="sr">Serbian</option><option value="sk">Slovak</option><option
value="sl">Slovenian</option><option value="es">Spanish</option><option value="sw">Swahili</option><option value="sv">Swedish</option><option value="th">Thai</option><option
value="tr">Turkish</option><option value="uk">Ukrainian</option><option value="ur">Urdu</option><option value="vi">Vietnamese</option><option value="cy">Welsh</option><option
value="yi">Yiddish</option></select>
English (auto-detected) » English

[SOLVED] Dual boot windows 7 and arch Linux with seperate hard drives

Ok so I'm stuck trying to get my computer to dual boot windows 7 and arch. They are installed on different hard drives and I have grub 2 as the boot loader. I can't find any tutorials on how to do it with seperate hard drives I know how to do it if they are on the same hard drive. Also I want windows on the "first" hard drive how do I check to see which one it considers the first?
Last edited by bdawg (2012-09-21 23:15:37)

DSpider wrote:
drobole wrote:If you want to change it so that sda becomes sdb and sdb becomes sda, you should be able to do that in BIOS.
Not from the BIOS. He would need to physically open up the computer and switch the cables between them (or add another drive).
There's no actual performance increase in changing this order. Performance increase is when you have the partitions as close to the beginning of a HDD as possible, where the platters spin faster (basic mechanics, not to be confused with CD/DVD, which are being written from the inside-out to prevent errors after extended usage), and it especially doesn't apply to SSDs whatsoever.
You may be right about that. I remember I had to do this a while back but I probably switched the cables. It also messed up the drive mapping in Windows 98 if I remember correctly.

Dual boot Windows 7 and Arch from 2 seperate drives (UEFI)

Hello everyone, I've been working on installing Arch to a secondary hard drive for the past few hours, but I am trying to make sure I won't mess up my Windows 7 install. I have found several topics talking about dual booting Windows 7 and Arch, but not a whole lot on booting them from separate drives. My drives are currently setup as follows.
sda (120GB SSD for Windows 7)
sda1 (100MB System Reserved NTFS partition)
sda2 (Windows 7 install)
sdb (1TB HDD for Windows programs, files, etc)
sdb1 (1TB NTFS partition)
sdc (1TB HDD)
sdc1 (boot 512MB FAT32)
sdc2 (root 500MB ext4)
sdc3 (home 300GB ext4)
sdc4 (swap 10GB)
rest unallocated "free space"
I used Gparted to create the partitions. I ended up getting hung up on the "Create Filesystems" sections, specifically this line"
# mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdXY
Now that I am looking at it, I'm thinking the "Create Filesystems" section maybe isn't necessary because I've used Gparted?
If it isn't necessary, when I get to the "mount the EFI System Partition to /boot" section, would I simply use
# mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/boot
instead of
# mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/boot ?
The way I had this setup with Ubuntu was 3 partitions on sdc (/, home, swap) and I set my PC to boot to the sdc drive on startup. The boot loader would then give me the option to boot into Ubuntu or Windows 7, and I never had to alter the sda or sdb drives at all. Is this possible through Arch? My thinking is that even if it isn't, I should still be able to enter the BIOS boot menu and select which drive to boot manually correct? That wouldn't be too big of a deal for me because I spend 90% of my time in Linux, and only use Windows for Photoshop and gaming occasionally.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I would have just tested this out, but I am afraid of messing up my Windows install.

After several sleepless hours I had to give up and go to bed about 5 hours ago. The installation process went smoothly (or so I thought). I followed the tutorial closely and upon rebooting I was met with a blinking cursor. After some googling I found others who said I should press TAB, but nothing seemed to work.
I rebooted to the iso disk and found the "boot installed OS" option and noticed it said "Press TAB to edit". I then found the boot parameters and tried everything from hd0 0 to hd4 4. I believe I have Grub setup correctly because every option besides hd0 0 either says "Booting..." and then gets stuck, or says "That disk and partition combination does not exist". So yea, I think hd0 0 is the correct boot path, it just gets stuck with the blinking cursor.
silverhammermba wrote:
You have the right idea. You want to install a bootloader on sdc1 which will be able to boot both Arch and Windows.
Your best bet would be to use something like rEFInd. It has a "scanfor" option that should automatically detect your BIOS-configured Windows installation and add a boot option for it. Note that depending on your motherboard, you may have to switch to UEFI-only mode and Windows will be unbootable without the assistance of a UEFI program which is backwards compatible with BIOS (like rEFInd).
Thank you for the link. Considering I can't get into my install and the actual install only took about 30 minutes, I think I am going to just start from the beginning again with REFIndr. It seems much simpler. I only used Grub because I've used it before with Ubuntu, but my very limited knowledge is telling me Grub is probably the problem.
MoonSwan wrote:Just an idea: My bios has a "Boot-up Prompt" which I can invoke when it's POSTing by hitting F11. This brings me to a menu that allows me to choose which drive I want to boot up that day. I use it when Syslinux isn't working properly (Which is right now as a matter of fact ...) in order to boot Windows so I can do some SCII, for example. I, too, dual-boot but I have both OSes on different SSDs. So my 120GB Crucial SSD has Arch on it and the 240GB Kingston has Windows, SCII, Portable Apps, etc and nary the two shall meet. It makes dual-booting easier in the case of a corrupt OS or MBR or what-have-you. You may want to give your Bios a better look to see if you can do the F11 trick. It probably can and will usually tell you so at POST by printing that information on-screen along with your drives-detected and other messages (I hit Pause sometimes to read all the POST messages).
This is exactly what I was talking about doing when I mentioned:
My thinking is that even if it isn't, I should still be able to enter the BIOS boot menu and select which drive to boot manually correct?
That's good to know, because even if this next install doesn't work I think if I pull the other drives I should be able to get it working fairly easily.
Thanks again everyone.

Dual booting Windows 7 and Vista on dv9620 on dual hard drives

Hi this might look like a repeat question but i haven't seen it answered by anyone that has tried it.
I downloaded the release candidate of Windows 7 and i want to dual boot it on my notebook.
The drives I have available are Disc0 which holds C: (the drive running Vista) and E: the HP_Recovery partition.
Then I have Disc1 which holds D: the Data drive and nothing else.
I want to run Windows 7 on the D: drive So can anyone who has done this tell me how they did it? Most of the dual booting how to's I've seen are for for booting on seperate partitions a single hard drive and because i'm something of a novice to this I would like some advice with more reference to my situation.

Hello and welcome,
You can probably finagle the partitions to allow for dual boot: copy the contents of D: to C: and delete D:, for instance. Speculating, since I don't have an IdeaPad to test on. You usually/probably/maybe lose the OneKey Recovery feature if you touch the partitions.
Others here on the Linux board may have been able to preserve OKR, but I'll leave that to them to describe since I haven't done it.
Long way of leading up to the question: is it sufficient to run Linux in a virtual machine, or as a WUBI install within windows? That keeps things simple and makes backups much easier as well.
Whatever you do, burn your recovery media first. Now.
Z.
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