I have a computer that I would like to completely transfer to new (better) hardware. I have an external hard drive, and I am attempting to clone the entire C: drive to it, making it bootable. The computer I"m trying to clone is 32 bit windows 7.
I downloaded DriveImage XML for this, which seems like a good tool to use for this purpose. I selected the "drive to drive" option, and chose for the C: drive to get cloned onto the external hard drive. It gives me an error along the lines of "Unable to lock DISK1 #1 (which is the number and partition of the external hard drive). I opted to ignore it, since there was little help on the web, and continued on with the rewrite.
The rest ran without a hitch, but hours later when it finished I plugged it into my 64 bit machine (windows 7 as well) and it wouldn't boot. I got your basic "Could not find bootable drive" or whatever. I'm wondering if I did something wrong, as most of the resources online give instructions to create a disk image and then extract it (which seems like it's an unnecessary step, and I'd need yet another hard drive as the middleman).
Should I try again (I'm reluctant to because it takes forever), try some other software, or do something completely different than what I'm doing?
Forgive me if this is obvious, I haven't done much messing with drives in the past.
UPDATE: I tried running a repair disc on the hard drive when trying to run it from the new machine. It looks like it did something though: Instead of no boot device recognized, the red and yellow windows 7 startup start to swirl around, and then it shuts down again. When I boot from it again it says that it failed the first time, and none of the safe mode etc. options work. Trying startup repair on the windows 7 repair disc makes it process for a while and eventually come up with a message that states it is unable to fix the issue. I am now going to reformat the external hard drive, download different disc cloning software, and try again. Any help in the meantime would be useful though!