Can I just copy the windows folder onto another hard drive and boot from it?

Question

I have two hard drives in my laptop and I am sure that the primary one is going to fail. It's been making really loud clicking noises and it seems to only be a matter of time. I've already backed up all of my files. Can I just copy the windows folder from my one hard drive onto the other and boot from it or do I have to reinstall Windows on the new hard drive? I don't have the disk, so I'm obviously looking for another solution.

Answer 1

No, it will not boot if you do so. It's like a programs files; you can't just go into "Program Files", copy, paste them elsewhere, and expect the program to run. There are more things the operating system has to do to boot other than use the Windows folder.

Answer 2

I was looking for free software to clone my Win XP Pro x64 from my system or boot partition to a secondary hard drive. The secondary HDD is smaller than the boot partition on the primary HDD. The primary HDD has 2 partitions, 500 GiB with the system boot, and a 1.3 TB for data only.I tried several cloning programs which did not work on my system.

-Free MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition is a great program, but would not make the secondary drive bootable unless I cloned the entire primary drive with both partitions.

-Xxclone also free was easier to use, took a little longer, works while Windows is still running (no rebooting), but on my system did not quite do the job. The secondary HDD became bootable sort of. Mouse was active, there was no desktop at all and it cycled through startup and shutdown repeatedly.



This next one worked great, on my system at least, It is called:

AOMEI Partition Assistant (PA) Standard Edition is free for PC OS

and is a free download from http://www.disk-partition.com/ It looks almost the same as MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition, but when you clone/copy the boot partition only, using AOMEI PA Standard Edition, the result is a fully bootable hard drive.



One last thing, these are all very powerful pieces of software and can seriously cripple or destroy system and data files. I was a newbie once and I have had to re-install Windows and all applications several times in the past.

Answer 3

Hello,



I don't think so, you can't just copy and paste the folder from harddisk to another one. Windows needs registry and some other system files that you can't copy.



Probably you need to get the Windows Installer CD to get Windows in another harddisk.



Might help.

Answer 4

No you can't it just wont work but you can use CMD to ghost it. Unless you know how to just search for a program that will clone your hard drive there are alot out there.

Answer 5

You could use HDcopy

Answer 6

nope u can't