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I would like to move my Windows 7 OS partition from Hard Drive A to Hard Drive B (the boot partition is on Hard Drive C). My game plan is:

  1. Connect all three hard drives to the computer.
  2. Use Partition Wizard (the bootable CD edition) to copy the OS partition from Hard Drive A to Hard Drive B.
  3. Instruct the boot partition to look for the OS in Hard Drive B (can it be done using bcdedit?)
  4. Extend the size of the partition (using the Windows 7 Disk Manager) to fit the entire size of Hard Drive B.

Should this work? Is there anything I'm missing?

EDIT: after taking a second look, the Partition Wizard guys are warning against copying the Windows 7 system partition using the bootable CD. This means I will probably go with copying the disk instead of the partition in step 2.

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I take it that Win7 is not installed on the boot disk.

It's not that easy to change all references to a hard disk. These are found in the registry, and you can get into trouble monkeying with that. bcdedit doesn't help here.

The best bet is, after copying A->B, to simply connect B instead of A.
Then no changes are required.

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AFAIK, Windows 7 will always treat the OS partition as "C:\". Do you think there might be references to non-MSDOS names? – On Freund Dec 13 '09 at 15:49
Windows keeps references to hard disks that include disk and partition numbers - it's better to not monkey with that. C is always the boot disk. I agree with your edit that disk copy is a safer plan. – harrymc Dec 13 '09 at 16:21
Another option I thought of it to create a backup image using the Windows 7 built-in backup program, and then restore it into the other drive. Do you think it's safer? – On Freund Dec 13 '09 at 20:00
I don't believe the Windows 7 backup can copy disks. I would prefer Partition Wizard as being more generalized. If the disk you're copying has multiple partitions, be careful to copy them in exactly the same order (don't have to be the same size). – harrymc Dec 13 '09 at 21:20
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