Mirroring Vista to a different Hard Disk

I recently installed Vista onto an 80 GB hard drive, intending to just
check it out, but I now intend to use it as my main OS, and I'd like
to move it over to a newer, more reliable 120 GB hard drive, which
I've never done before. Could anyone tell me the easiest, most
painless way to accomplish this? I'd rather not have to reinstall
vista, but I can if need be.

Hi, Zugy.

Reinstall probably is your best bet.

I have had success by simply booting into a parallel system (WinXP or Vista)
on the same computer and using Xcopy with appropriate switches. But I was
moving only the Boot Volume (not the System Partition) in a multi-boot
system. Xcopy doesn't usually work well for moving the currently-running
operating system; too many open files, especially the Registry and other
gut-level stuff.

If you want to try it (and have a good backup or are willing to risk losing
all), then boot into the OTHER Windows or Vista installation and, assuming
you want to move Vista from Drive X: to Drive Y:, type at a Command Prompt:
xcopy X:\ Y:\ /c /h /e /r /k

You might need to used BCDEdit when finished to point the boot manager to
the right location. That's easy to do but hard to explain, so I'll save it
until you need it.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@grandecom.net
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Mail in Vista Ultimate x64)

<zugy343@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1172016670.962351.102520@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>I recently installed Vista onto an 80 GB hard drive, intending to just
> check it out, but I now intend to use it as my main OS, and I'd like
> to move it over to a newer, more reliable 120 GB hard drive, which
> I've never done before. Could anyone tell me the easiest, most
> painless way to accomplish this? I'd rather not have to reinstall
> vista, but I can if need be.