I was searching for a guide about this due to the fact that I was in a similar situation where I had just bought a new faster hard drive to replace my original drive.

The problem was I wanted to retain windows Vista and keep all the settings and programs stored in the old drive.
And another problem was I didn't want to do a Vista repair Installation as I had bad experiences with that previously(lost files from original user account).

So through searching I compiled a few simple steps to just jump from your current Vista on an existing drive to a brand new faster drive.

Things you'll need and what you need to do before you begin.

1.Plug in the new drive, make sure its detected and Vista will automatically install the drivers needed. Check if your drive is detected in the Device Manager(Disk drives)



2.First go to Device Manager->go to your Storage Controllers(example - IDE ATA/ATAPI controller)
Locate the controller for your drives.

If you are in IDE mode(set in BIOS) you need to make sure your controller is the Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller.(If its already like that, leave as it is).

If you are in AHCI/RAID mode(set in BIOS) you need to make sure your controller is the Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller.(If its already like that, leave as it is).



This is to avoid the blue screen of death after booting into Vista with your new drive.

3. Partition the new drive to as many partitions you want. As long as there's a partition that has enough space to backup your current C:/ Windows Drive.

You can use any Disk Partition Software. I personally recommend Paragon Partition Magic.


4. Use a disk imaging program to copy the existing C:\ and the current Hard drive to the new hard drive(if you have multiple partitions just select any, just make sure the partition has enough space to copy from the original drive).

Basically what you're doing is duplicating/copying drive C: AND YOUR CURRENT VISTA SETUP to a new drive.

I recommend using Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image, if I'm not mistaken Partition Magic also has an option to copy/duplicate hard drive.

I'll provide the step-by-step for Norton Ghost.(I'm sure the process is similar in Acronis True Image.









Choose copy drive->next->choose your windows drive as source(usually drive C:)->next->choose drive/partition you want for destination.->next->check the following options.(check source for errors/check destination for errors/set drive active for booting OS/Copy MBR)
Wait for the copying process to finish.

Once its finished, shut down your computer. Disconnect your current hard drive and let the new drive take its place.

Go to your bios and choose the new drive as first booting Hard drive.

Now, if you try loading it now, you could end up with two things.
Number 1 - BSOD(because you didn't follow the steps above for storage controllers).
Number 2 - Vista will prompt you to login. And display a "Preparing your desktop" message and will stay stuck that way for eternity.

Here are the final steps.

Boot into Vista safemode(press f8 while booting).
Login and wait, in safe mode the "preparing your desktop" message is still there but will disappear after a while.
After the message disappears you'll be left a blank desktop.(no taskbar/ nadda zip).
Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring the task manager. Go to File->New Task->Run->type regedit.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\MountedDevices. And you'll see entries like this - \DosDevices\C. - at the lower end of the page.
What you should do now is replace the values from \DosDevices\x. to \DosDevices\C. - x being the new drive/partition that you copied your original C:\ onto.
(Example, I copied the Vista setup from my old hard drive C:\ to the G:\ partition on my new drive.)
(So in this case I have to copy the values from \DosDevices\G. to \DosDevices\C.)

To copy the values, double-click on the DosDevices\x. or e.g - DosDevices\G. and copy the values in the Value Data box.(you can't select all of the numbers in the box, this is normal)



Paste the values you copied to the DosDevices\C. Value Data Box.



Then, delete the entry for DosDevices\G.



To make things clear, we're making windows think the new drive is actually still Windows C:\ by replacing the address values from the new drive entry to the old drive entry.

Reboot and it'll work like it should.

The best thing about this is that,
You don't have to re-install windows.
You don't have to re-run Windows Update.
You only need two drives for this to work.( As long as the destination drive has enough capacity).
You don't need to re-install drivers.
You don't lose any programs or User files. (Files in My documents, My Music, and so on).

After doing this, my Windows Experience Index increased from 5.6 to 5.9 and read/write speed increased to due moving the O.S to the newer, faster, larger drive. So imagine moving from an old IDE to an SSD.

Cheers

Best regards,
Zakov

This post has been edited by Zakov: Oct 11 2009, 07:47 PM