Creating New Partitions And Resizing Partitions In Windows 7, Backing Up On A New Hd.

Hi, I've got a couple of difficult jobs (for a relative novice) and I don't know if they're even possible. Hopefully somebody can tell me if they are, and how to achieve them, preferably with free software .

How can I copy my windows 7 x64 home premium OS onto another hard drive. I've used free software before to first copy my entire hard drive onto another identical model hard drive, as I wasn't confident I'd get the partitions precisely correct, and then used diskpart to change its ID to the old hard drive ID so windows would accept it. I then used Nero 10 to backup the hard drive, restoring the backup to either hard drive when needed. Now one of the hard drives has died, I could get another of these 1TB HDs second hand on ebay and repeat the process, but there is a danger they're just as old and tired. I'd like to use a new hard drive, but as a different model I'm sure a diskpart ID change won't stop windows rejecting it, so is there a way around it? I suppose the partitions would also have to be identical, for Nero to copy the backup into them and the OS to boot.

Second problem is my PC came with one small partition, about 10 Gigs that is Hidden, and one big partition for the rest. In the new hard drive I'd like to resize the partition down to 100 Gigs (I think that's enough) for the OS and the rest a partition for my files. How can I do this? Thanks

 

I was hoping to avoid a fresh install. I recently had to restore an old backup from 2014, and it took a couple of days uploading all the updates. I didn't use automatic updates so I could avoid the windows 10 recommended updates. I'm guessing a fresh install would take longer. For old updates windows takes an age to upload, which is strange when you consider you can download the updates separately instantly. Unfortunately I only know how to install from the command line one at a time.

 

You wouldn't have this dilemma if you weren't trying to maintain two identical drives. Why not just image your drive to an external as everyone else does? If your disk should fail you can restore your image to any suitable replacement disk, no need for the disk or partition sizes to be identical and the disk ID is immaterial. I assume Nero can do this but if not there are several free imaging programs we can recommend which can.

You can shrink the main partition without third party software. Win 7 Disk Management has this capability but it may not be able to shrink it as much as you want. In that case you could use the free Partition Wizard with which you can add/delete or resize partitions.