How to copy my Windows installation to new disk (with some conditions)

Question

How can I copy my entire Windows 7 hard disk to another? The main point is to copy all files in the NTFS partition and their respective attributes/permissions.

The caveats are:

• the source disk doesn't boot, but is accessible in an external drive
• the source disk and destination disk are of different sizes
• I don't have another working Windows installation

Answer 1

You can do it using a Clonezilla bootable CD. You will need to clone your entire drive to a Clonezilla image.

However, as you said, your disk drives have different sizes. You must be careful with that because a bigger image will not be recovered to a smaller disk. You can solve this by resizing your old disk before creating your Clonezilla image. To do that I, recommend you use Easesus partition manager.

Maybe you can find more information in this post.