Windows – What’s the best way to move a windows 7 installation from a hdd to another

disk-imagewindowswindows 7

I have a hdd with windows 7 installed on it. I would like to move (or clone) the whole system to another (in this case smaller) hdd. What is the best and easiest way to do it? Basically I would need some kind of copy operation which would handle the differenct hdd sizes and copy everything including the boot loader. What method do you recommend?

Best Answer

Use the Windows Automated install kit and use imagex. When you install the kit you will see step by step walkthru on how to create and image. Skip the sysprep parts and go right to the part where you use imagex. You will then have an image that will be (roughly) as small as possible. Follow the deployment steps on the smaller harddrive. note that you can copy the image right from the larger harddrive to the smaller one then deploy it to the same hardrive it's reading from.

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Windows – What’s the command-line utility in Windows to do a reverse DNS look-up

ping -a w.x.y.z

Should resolve the name from the IP address if the reverse lookup zone has been set up properly. If the reverse lookup zone does not have an entry for the record, the -a will just ping without a name.

Windows – What’s the best way to do user profile/folder redirect/home directory archiving

Something that may work better is to run a script that automatically copies data using robocopy or a similar program, at a specific time during the night, to a backup server. That way, users are working directly on their own machines, but the data is being archived daily while they are not at their desks (say, 8pm to 5am).

Best Answer

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Windows – What’s the command-line utility in Windows to do a reverse DNS look-up

Windows – What’s the best way to do user profile/folder redirect/home directory archiving

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