How to Copy Windows 7 Image to Another Hard Drive With Ubuntu (Live Cd)

Step-by-Step Guide

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   Step 1: Set up in advance

   If you now start the command "sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc" Ubuntu will start to copy the image of drive sda to drive sdc (all date on drive sdc will be lost).
   
   It starts directly after you start the command and it does not give you any information that it has started or how the status is. ,, Luckily you can add the free space easily to the partition by expanding the volume in Windows 7 Disk Manager, just click on the new Windows 7 partition and chose to expand the volume.
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   Step 2: both hard drives (old and new one) and a CD/DVD drive need to work in your PC;

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   Step 3: Ensure that the hard drive you want to move the image to has a working and formatted partition which is larger than the one with Windows 7 installed

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   Step 4: Download the current Ubuntu version and burn it on CD (I used Desktop CD Ubuntu 32-bit 12.04)

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   Step 5: Reboot your PC and start Ubuntu from the CD (don't install Ubuntu just use the "Try it"/Live CD function)

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   Step 6: After Ubuntu Desktop has fully loaded

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   Step 7: type in the command "sudo fdisk -l" into a Terminal and check the exact name of your mounted drives.

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   Step 8: But you can check how many GB have been processed if you open a second terminal window and type in "sudo kill -SIGUSR1 $(pidof dd)" - the first terminal window will then show how many GB have been processed so far and the speed (MB per second) You know the process has finished as soon as you can type in commands in the first terminal again

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   Step 9: Now shut down your PC and connect the new hard drive to the SATA cable of the old hard drive (If Windows won't start try to fix MBR by booting from Windows installation CD and using the repair function) Windows should now start as nothing has been changed If your new hard drive was bigger than the old one you will see that a partition has been made of the exact size of your old drive/partition.

Detailed Guide

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