Windows XP clone Win XP internal drive and upgrade to Win 7

[c9works]

Maybe there are threads and posts that explain this exactly but I haven't found them yet.
Here is what I need to do as simply as possible.
Have a Dell Latitude D620 laptop - I'd like to clone the internal drive with a Windows XP Pro installation. I'd like to clone it to an external USB hard drive. May also like to create a bootable USB flash drive from the Windows XP internal drive (with selected files - not all user files.)
Then I'd like to install Windows 7 to my internal drive with an install CD that I've used once before - a family Windows 7 from XP upgrade disc that I bought several years ago.

Problems I''ve been having - cloning the internal drive to an external drive using Seagate Disc Wizard - the drive cloned to or the internal drive must be a Seagate, so it's not usable unless I buy a new Seagate drive. Downloaded Clonezilla and burned the ISO to a CD but not sure how to use it.
I have backed up internal drive using the disk wizard and the WinXP backup utility and would hope that I could restore it using a bootable floppy or after reinstalling XP on the drive. Is there an easy way to do any of this with Windows or is it all problematic?

 

[badrobot]

Try Macrium Reflect Free. It also has a cloning feature and easy to use.

 

[Neverbattle]

Wow,clone Win XP internal drive.

 

[seekermeister]

Try Macrium Reflect Free. It also has a cloning feature and easy to use.

When you clone an OS drive, does it also copy the MBR and mark the drive as active?

 

[badrobot]

I don't know about Win 7 but the Win 8 machine that I cloned does not have a partition marked as "active" but instead created a separate partition marked as "EFI System Partition".

 

[seekermeister]

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?

 

[c9works]

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.

 

[badrobot]

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.

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?

 

[Pauli]

Dell Latitude D620 is barely or hardly compatible with Windows 7.

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I would recommend a computer upgrade. Sorry about the somewhat bad news.

 

[Mike]

Is there an easy way to do any of this with Windows or is it all problematic?

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.

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

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?

>>>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. This is due to limitations in both the laptop BIOS as well as the laptop Motherboard hardware. You are trying to do something that NO laptop is designed to do! What you may be able to is to purchase one of the DVD bay hard drive adapters such as here for very low cost: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SATA-2nd-HDD-SSD-Hard-Drive-Caddy-for-12-7mm-Universal-CD-DVD-ROM-Optical-Bay-/280820379708?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item416232f03c

I've not personally used this setup for multi-OS/drive boot as you are intending, but several of my colleagues on another Forum I'm on have done this including OS-bootabilityusing an SSD drive in the DVD bay.
The trick is that your hard drive must be a SATA I or SATA II drive in order for the BIOS to recognize it. Since the BIOS can recognize any internal drives; the hard drive in the DVD bay looks like a 2nd internal drive to the BIOS and can thus boot from it. Be careful however, if you decide to buy a SATA III (6.0Gb/sec) drive, as that D620 BIOS probably can't handle a drive that new. So, you are not going to get a 4TB drive as that 2nd internal drive. However, if you download and flash your existing BIOS with the latest version available from Dell's support site, you may be able to do a 2TB maybe even a 3TB drive; as long as it's SATA II and NOT SATA III. I haven't personally verified this, as I don't have money for drives this large to play around with. But, based on conversations I'm involved in, anything 2TB or larger will probably require a BIOS flash upgrade to work. Can't guarantee the multi-boot capability, so you'll have to try it if you are using a 2TB drive or larger and report back to us if you have success.

Hope this proves helpful. Good Luck with the upgrade.
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>