posted on Aug, 10 2011 @ 04:28 PM
reply to post by Manhater
Hopefully this helps a bit but I spent months trying to find this same thing. Best Buy refused to do it and my local stores laughed when I asked how
much they'd run me to do a mirror of one drive to the other...AND...have it bootable in my box when I plug the new copy in.
The folks at runtime.org have two programs I've been using since I found them. They're both free with no issues whatever, so there is nothing in it
for me whether you use them or not...but I can say from experience they do work. Shadowcopy and Driveimage are the programs they make which will copy
off an entire HD, restore it to an entirely different physical HD (or the same..whatever) and MAINTAIN a 100% functional and bootable windows
environment.
I will admit I had to run Fixmbr once to tweak the boot record on the new copy HD and get windows to correct some minor format issue. 10 seconds and
it worked as if it'd been the drive installed the whole time. I've mirrored over 6 drives with this software including a swap between a conventional
magnetic drive and a new S.S.D. drive for my laptop. I was dubious, but it booted right up, first try on the new SSD as if nothing had changed at all.