How to create Windows 7 image backup from multiple partitions

[Ricky Katomi]

I have 3 Hard Disks and 6 partitions (C,D,G,F,I,H). I want to put those partitions on single hard drive. The new hard drive is 1 TB. Now when I am looking at windows image backup I see that it creates only one image for all partitions.

Can I make same setup like I had before with multiple partitions? Can I backup on multiple partitions so windows can boot from C and all other programs would be on different partitions?

Do I loose install information like program path? Are programs would work if I restore backup of all partitions on single partition?

I want this because I don't know if lot's of installed programs will work if I put all in one partitions and because I want Windows to be on one partition and all other files on different.

 

[SortNVF]

You cant just move a program from C to D and expect it to work. So obviusly making 6 drives into one will cause some trouble.
Either you can create 6 partitions on the new drive, and just clone the old partitions one by one, then finally get the drive letters sorted. Or you can clone your OS partition and carefully change every install divided over the partitions..

Personally i run two or three partitions, preferably each on its own drive.

One for OS and i do meen just for OS, not even the desktop saves here. In some SSD cases with price issues you may want games and high performance programs on the OS HDD but its not really the best way to go. In such cases a ghost image of the OS disk should be kept on secondary drive.

Secondary drive is where programs go and if you only have two drives/partitions, you put your mails, desktop, documents, savegames etc here.

Third drive/partition is where your files go in a perfect world. If you do this with physical drives, you can backup all your valuable data, from just that one drive, backup is best done to a physically seperate unit, like a cloud or external drive, not stored on top of or connected to the machine other than for the actual backup procedure.

To get the best out of a new drive, you really should start from a fresh OS installation and add the programs in the new framework

 

[Ricky Katomi]

You cant just move a program from C to D and expect it to work. So obviusly making 6 drives into one will cause some trouble.
Either you can create 6 partitions on the new drive, and just clone the old partitions one by one, then finally get the drive letters sorted. Or you can clone your OS partition and carefully change every install divided over the partitions..

Personally i run two or three partitions, preferably each on its own drive.

One for OS and i do meen just for OS, not even the desktop saves here. In some SSD cases with price issues you may want games and high performance programs on the OS HDD but its not really the best way to go. In such cases a ghost image of the OS disk should be kept on secondary drive.

Secondary drive is where programs go and if you only have two drives/partitions, you put your mails, desktop, documents, savegames etc here.

Third drive/partition is where your files go in a perfect world. If you do this with physical drives, you can backup all your valuable data, from just that one drive, backup is best done to a physically seperate unit, like a cloud or external drive, not stored on top of or connected to the machine other than for the actual backup procedure.

To get the best out of a new drive, you really should start from a fresh OS installation and add the programs in the new framework

Unfortunately on all 6 partitions I have huge amount of installed applications because of my work so to do fresh install and the time needed for installing and finding apps discourages me.

Creating same setup on new drive and cloning every partition then after changing drive letter is maybe best solution for me like you said at this moment till I buy more drives. If anybody has other opinion I am listening.

 

[ArtPog]

Your description of your present system setup seems to indicate that the total data contained in the six partitions of your three HDDs is not > the disk capacity of your 1 TB HDD to which you want to transfer that total data. So there's no problem with the 1 TB HDD containing all your data from the three HDDs, right?

Using an appropriate disk-cloning program you could clone the contents of each of those six partitions contained on the three HDDs over to the 1 TB HDD. The process is relatively straightforward. Here's an outline of one approach based on the disk-cloning program I use - Casper 8.

Clone your Windows 7 OS to the unpartitioned/unformatted 1 TB HDD. During the disk-cloning operation you'll have an option to create the size of the partition you desire to contain the OS.

Following the successful disk-cloning operation, using Disk Management you can create the five other partitions sizing them accordingly.

Your 1 TB HDD will then boot straightaway and all your data partitions will be accessible.

After the disk-cloning operation has successfully completed you probably will be thinking about future backups of your entire system. Here again you could use a disk-cloning program to good advantage. You could simply clone the entire contents of your 1 TB HDD to another disk and maintain comprehensive backups of your entire system in one fell swoop. Naturally you would have to invest in another HDD which you could also connect either internally in your system or perhaps preferably as a USB external HDD to serve as the destination disk.

 

[Ricky Katomi]

Thanks to all taking time to answer.