Moving a WIndows 7 installation to a new drive, with a caveat

The goal:

I want to move my windows 7 installation from the old SSD to a new one.

The problem:

The 100MB system partition that windows uses to boot is on another drive. Why and how did it get there is not up for discussion now.

Disk setup:

128GB Kingston (old) SSD:

• one NTFS partition, whole disk, windows 7 installed here

150GB Raptor:

• 100MB windows system partition


• one NTFS partition for the rest

2TB backup/data drive:

• one big NTFS partition, with enough space to store all three other disks

120GB OCZ (new) SSD:

• one big ext4 partition (used for linux, but I don't care what happens to it now, consider this disk empty)

I want to move the windows to the new SSD and I want to have all that is required too boot it on the same drive. (Right now I have too tell BIOS to boot the raptor which then boots the old SSD). Normal disk imaging with Acronis or a similar program may not work because windows needs that 100MB partition to boot. If I could somehow create the 100MB partition on the old SSD, copying it to the new one wouldn't be a problem, but as it is, I don't know what to do.

Answer

The 100MB partition is not a necessity; just image your Windows and put it on the new SSD, then set your computer to boot of the new drive and Windows partition, marking it active.

The System Reserved people serves as a recovery environment and also to allow people to lock their complete Windows partition or drive with BitLocker, if you do none of both you simply don't need that partition. What the boot manager from that partition simply does is chain loading the boot of the Windows partition.

Don't believe me? Boot from your old SSD and set the Windows partition active and see for yourself.