Just swapped my old HD out on my Windows 7/Linux box.
Have: 1.5TB main drive split up into several data drives and one operating system volume. Windows was fine, but Linux (specifically Fedora) was reporting "numerous" sectors as "marked bad" by the SMART facility.
So I bought a new drive:
2 TB Hitachi SATA 3 green drive.Thought about clonzilla. Even DLd and burned the iso boot disc (debian based). Then thought "To hell with that!" Linux' NTFS file capabilities are getting pretty strong, so I'll "see what we'll see... won't we?..."
-Under Siege. I knew that no matter what I did, it would be tricky as Seagate has cloning applets for their drives when you install them, but they will NOT let me clone a Seagate onto some other brand. Damn!
So I boot up good old Knoppix 6.7 Live CD. Great piece of work there!
I run 'gparted' and it allows me to initialize the drive and copy each volume from the 1.5TB drive onto the new 2 TB drive, expanding each.
So my original c: of 90GB became 160GB.
Then, my 2 200 GB drives became 2 250GB drives, and my 500GB drive stayed the same. I did not copy any of my Linux volumes over, nor the XOSL boot volume, so I still have over 450GB of as yet completely unallocated space on the drive.
Next step was the get it to boot windows. so I DETACH the new drive and go into my system like normal without it, and create a system recovery disc.
Next, I again shutdown to detach the original drive, attach the new and boot the recovery disc, and have it repair the boot sector on the new drive. VIOLA! The drive now boots and it is faster too!. I give a good hard look at all the copied volumes to insure that they indeed did carry the data over from the old drive. The I again shutdown, and detach the new drive, and replace the old drive, and then boot KNOPPIX again. This time, I erase all the volume labels I had on the drive, and I turn off the boot flag on the old original C: drive, but I left that volume label alone, just in case I ran into problems (not sure what my logic was).
ANOTHER shutdown, and re-attach all the drives, and make sure they are in the desired order in the MOBO BIOS. Reboot. Windows should come up (IF you did not put any paging files on any of those drives) with all the drives in the right order, and the old drives at the end. If not, some drive letter assignment re-hashing must be done in a Disc Management session.
The, I went one step further, and pointed the MOBO at the old drive, which still has the XOSL boot loader on it. I should be able to "swap" them at boot time and still get windows to boot from "C:". Then the old Linux installs should be a cake walk to get back up again.
VIOLA! No re-installs and no SkyTard level FAIL modes!