clone xp internal drive to bootable external & install win 7

[win7good]

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?

 

[TrainableMan]

Well a few issues ... Windows XP can't be booted from an external drive; in fact this functionality wasn't added to Windows until Win 8. You should be able to clone it to an external but not boot to it from there.

Next, if you already upgraded another PC with that W7 DVD then the product key is in use on that other computer plus upgrade disks are tied to the original license which would be that other PCs XP which most likely came preinstalled and is therefore OEM which extends to the upgrade which means it cannot legally be transferred to another computer. And if that other computer is still in use then installing W7 using that same product key is even a bigger risk because not only is it illegal but if/when Microsoft detects multiple computers using the same license it can terminate those activations making both computers display a message on a forced all-black desktop saying the OS is not legal.

I've never tried Clonezilla so I can't help you there but if your drive is Western Digital you can also use try the WD free version of Acronis. Windows 7 comes with back-up software but it is not a "clone", to restore from that back-up,as far as I know, you need W7 installed. And to my knowledge XP had no such back-up/restore features included at all.

 

[win7good]

Well a few issues ... Windows XP can't be booted from an external drive; in fact this functionality wasn't added to Windows until Win 8. You should be able to clone it to an external but not boot to it from there.

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.

 

[TrainableMan]

So you have an upgrade version of W7? Once you upgrade your XP with that W7 upgrade DVD then you cannot legally also use your XP without uninstalling the W7. In other words it would not be legal to have a dual boot system with your XP and with a W7 whose license is linked to that XP.

XP can't boot fom an external drive anyway so it's fine to just have it cloned as a "backup". If you ever decide to go back to XP you will have to swap in the XP drive.

 

[pmshah]

I suggest you get usb bootable version of gparted / clonezilla or bootit baremetal.. To do a proper clone job you have to boot from an external media. You can also try Norton Ghost. I have used version 11 to create images that can be restored in under 15 minutes. Not sure about the current version 15. I use ghost to do fast installation when I have identical hardware, like building 10 / 15 systems under a single order. Advantage of using ghost is that you can access the image file to retrieve any file from within and it compresses extremely well. You might get a 6-7 gb image file for a 25-30 gb partition.