When you clone an OS drive, does it also copy the MBR and mark the drive as active?Try Macrium Reflect Free. It also has a cloning feature and easy to use.
Thanks for all the help. I have the same question. My installation of Windows XP Pro is legal and I want to clone it to an external drive that will be bootable. Then I want to do the Win7 upgrade on the internal drive, also a legal copy of Windows. Used Macrium Reflect Free which is a good and easy app to use as stated. The only way to test bootable is to pull out the internal drive and replace it with the external and test it. Have plenty of restorable backups from Windows Backup, Seagate Disk Wizard and others. Just hoping that I can restore them with a reinstallation of Windows XP Pro if need be one day. Any additional comments on these topics welcome.Hmm, I know very little about EFI. When you said that it "created" an EFI partition, am I to understand that means that partition didn't exist prior to the cloning? Also since I think that the hardware would have to support EFI, that it somehow determined that it would work properly before doing so. I'm still quite confused as to how that would come into play, because your OS partiton is not marked as active like mine is. I don't think that an OS volume would be bootable without being marked active on my system, but obviously it must be on your's. This is further confused by the fact that the EFI is unrelated to the MBR or GPT it uses, so I really don't know what it does?
Thanks for all the help. I have the same question. My installation of Windows XP Pro is legal and I want to clone it to an external drive that will be bootable. Then I want to do the Win7 upgrade on the internal drive, also a legal copy of Windows. Used Macrium Reflect Free which is a good and easy app to use as stated. The only way to test bootable is to pull out the internal drive and replace it with the external and test it. Have plenty of restorable backups from Windows Backup, Seagate Disk Wizard and others. Just hoping that I can restore them with a reinstallation of Windows XP Pro if need be one day. Any additional comments on these topics welcome.
There is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7. The ISO file you created is an image of the disk. It can be opened as a separate drive with a program like MagicDisc or with an extraction program such as WinRAR. You would be better off backing up all of the files and do a clean install of Windows 7. EFI is extensible firmware interface. It looks like you may have the recovery (protected system partition) from both Windows XP and Windows 7 on the same disk if they were not properly removed, but I can't be certain.Is there an easy way to do any of this with Windows or is it all problematic?
>>>c9works: just so you know laptops are funny critters and to my knowledge it is not possible to boot an OS drive (specifically XP) from an external USB or eSATA connection.Instead of pulling out the internal drive, have you tried just changing the boot priority in BIOS instead? How do you connect the external drive? eSata? USB?