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I have a new HD in my laptop and made a big mistake... i installed debian first and need windows also for some programms which will not run under wine or in VM, so i wanted to install windows now on this HD but i cant because i dont have the windows partition on sda1...

so i considered to just copy all data from my old HD (where win xp is installed) to my new partition. i cant just DD because my new winodws partition is smaller than the old one...

is it possible to copy it with eg linux live distro? or are there files which cant copied? grub will take care about boot stuff, so i think it should work but before i spend some hours copying, i rather ask first :)

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What you want to do will not work. What will work is split the existing parition into two and simply install Windows on one of them ( after you format the new parition ) and manually edit your boot loader. – Ramhound Jul 14 '11 at 11:48
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migrated from serverfault.com Jul 14 '11 at 11:37

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2 Answers

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I don't think that if you just copy all the files fom one partition to another one, Windows will boot-up. I recommend you use some image manager application (I use Clonezilla).

You must save your old partition as an image and recover it on the new HDD. Just take care to keep the same partition size for the new partition.

Hope this will solve your problem.

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the question is why? is there any specific data which is not showed as file from ntfs? i try to resize the original windows partition to the size of the new one and try dd... – reox Jul 14 '11 at 12:02
+1, I was going to say cloning, and I was going to say use Clonezilla. – Nick Josevski Jul 14 '11 at 12:02
+1 CloneZilla is great!! – Stephen Martin Jul 14 '11 at 13:49
okay here we go: thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_copy_a_Windows_installation i'll try it today! – reox Jul 14 '11 at 14:21
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okay... i tried yesterday both: just copying worked best, because i could boot up windows but got error message that hal.dll is not existing... may the ntfs rights wasnt correct or something... then i tried cloning: this failed because i could even boot up windows... all it said was data error or something (before even one dll was loaded). so what i did was this: saving my debian to ext drive with rsync, install windows, resync debian, install grub. worked 100% :) may cloning only works if both partitions are sda1 (and yes i adapted the win bootloader) – reox Jul 15 '11 at 5:48
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up vote 2 down vote

I would also use cloning. I have some experience with some old Acronis True Image and it worked very well from live-cd. There is a possibility to use free Seagate DiscWizard, which should be almost the same in basic functions. If you do not have a Seagate HDD, there are some tricks to get it working (without any hacking or illegal modifying) also with other HDDs. :-)

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