upgrading/cloning multi boot/partition HD help

[Unique]

i have a 160gb laptop HD that triple boots XPhome/Vista home/Win 7 and i want to take that drive out and replace with a 500gb drive. to save reinstalling windows, i'd like to clone the drive. i've done that before with single partitions, but not multi partitions

i don't need or necesarily want vista and win7, xp is fine. i'm not sure if i use norton ghost to clone only that partion, if it will boot up ok if i don't clone the other partitions too. normally if i cone from a smaller HD to a bigger one with single partition it makes the new drive a copy of the old, only with a larger partition. i haven't used ghost in a while, but i don't think you can copy a whole drive from a small one to a big one can you? i presume i would need to use ghost to copy each partition at a time, perhaps pre partitioning the new drive into three, and then use a partition manager to resize the xp to fill the rest of the drive, and if i wanted vista and win7 gone, then remove those seperately? as it's a big replacement drive, the size vista and win7 takes up wouldn't be a problem, so if it's easier to copy the whole lot first, then i'd probably rather do that, and look at removing later if/when i need the space

any help or tips appreciate, thanks

[Splash]

If you've installed in the order I think you have then you'll be using the Win7 bootloader. If you clone *only* the XP partition then you're likely to hit problems getting the OS to boot, but that should be easily repairably by booting from the XP CD and running fixmbr from the recovery console.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Use Paragon Partition Magic 8.5 Special Edition. It is available for free:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloa...isk-manager-se

I cloned my OS disc from a 250gb hard disk to a 320gb disk.

[Unique]

If you've installed in the order I think you have then you'll be using the Win7 bootloader. If you clone *only* the XP partition then you're likely to hit problems getting the OS to boot, but that should be easily repairably by booting from the XP CD and running fixmbr from the recovery console.

i installed xp/vista/win7 in that order, so i imagine it will be the win7 boot loader, and thought like you said that if i just copied xp that i might have a problem. it looks like paragon is able to clone the whole thing and i can resize from there, so i might try that as it will also save me finding my norton disc. it's not my main pc so i'm not too fussed if i screw up, it's just the time it takes to reinstall xp and all my apps and all the preferences and settings that's the pain. i'm considering keeping the old drive with the OS's on as a backup to reclone if things go wrong with the replacement drive

thanks for the help guys

[CX23882-19]

I've not used Ghost for years, but with Acronis True Image the dedicated "clone" feature has never worked correctly on my system. I recall cloning once and it messed up the drive letters on the old drive and didn't clone correctly to the new one.

So now, I create a full backup from the old drive, remove the old drive from the system, and then restore the backup image to the new drive. This has worked many times, and you shouldn't have issues with Windows activation because it clones the volume serial number too.

[Unique]

Use Paragon Partition Magic 8.5 Special Edition. It is available for free:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloa...isk-manager-se

I cloned my OS disc from a 250gb hard disk to a 320gb disk.

i actually had ghost installed already, but never even looked until i was in the middle of installing/registering paragon. paragon did what i wanted and worked fine. it copied all 4 (there was a tiny fat16 partition too) partitions, keeping them the same size and leaving the remaining space as unused. it had the option to enlarge all partitions by the same percentage they took on the original drive, but instead i used easus partition manager which is free, to resize the main xp partion to fill up the drive, so one large xp partion and vista and win7 on two small partitions. i've used easus a few times on different computers, never had a problem with it and it's free and easy to use

it was simple to use, and it ran in windows entirely instead of booting to DOS like the older versions of ghost

so thanks for that