OK, here is the saga up until now.
I have tried and failed four times to clone the system drive and boot a new bigger drive using the Easeus software. Each cloning took about 8 hours for a 500GB drive <sigh>. I then purchased the Easeus Backup Workstation software and tried another cloning with it, another 8 hours and another failure to boot. Then I used same software to do a Backup rather than a Clone. At that point I felt comfortable using the nuclear option that Roman recommended which was to use the Partition software to resize the system drive in place on the original drive. First I shrunk the Vista drive (D) of most of its free space, a 4 hour operation, then I allocated the 100gb to the Windows 7 drive (C), a 6 hour operation. That just finished...AND IT WORKED!!!
Now I have removed the somewhat healthy resized system drive and I am using the Easeus Recovery program to attempt to build a new system drive on a 2TB platform. It says it will take 7 hours for that. If it works I will have a new system drive with plenty of space, and I'll set the 500gb drive in the safe for any future potential recovery.
Preston,
I admire your tenacity. I have been using the Easus software for about a year with both XP and Win7 and it has always worked without a hitch. I always use the backup (not the clone) to make an image of my boot drive of 150 gb. It takes about 20 min. I actually made a backup last night that took 19 min. The one time I had to restore the partition to a new drive also took about 30 min. The other nice thing about the backup is it only makes an image of the used space. I think it may even do some compression because my 150 Gb partition of which 95 is supposedly used, gives me a backup file of 87 Gb. I have never tried the "clone" option. I can see where that might take longer if it is doing a sector by sector dupe.
My primary hard drive is a 1Tb drive with a 150Gb C: partition for the operating system (OS) and programs and a second D: partition for data. I've always believed it is a good idea to keep the operating system and data separate so that if the OS goes south it is easy to restore the C: partition without bothering the data partition. I would think with a duel boot config you could make a C: and D: partition for the 2 OSs and an E: partition for data. I can't believe it would take more that 150-200 Gb for OS and programs.
My systems are all Windows and use NTSF formatted drives. I'm wondering if your duel boot configuration uses a different disk format which may be the reason things are not going so smoothly?
Hope this helps and good luck getting your system back up.
Geo
