The only thing I can think of is not to forget to set the bootable flag! (I think it’s x because b is for BSD label?) When I was making this howto, I forgot it and had to reboot into Clonezilla only to toggle bootable on the partition after expanding it.

I’ve slipstreamed Windows XPSP3 into a couple of install disks before, but I couldn’t find any of them when I made the test rig for the screenshots. I’ll have to take a look at the nlite utility and see if it might make things easier.

Happy Hacking!

FIRESTORM_v1

With regard to your license being for SP1 and you needing SP3, what you may be able to do is get your original SP1 disk and using nlite add service packs to it and create yourself a new install disk with sp3 already on it, but requiring your original license key. M$ uses an assortment of keys (full product, oem, upgrade) and you need to right type of media to use with the right key. I do a new nlite install for every license key type I need to reinstall.

A USB drive totally works, you can clone as a drive or an image (i didn’t do images, i just did drives). Best of all is one of those universal drive adaptors or docks that allow you to plug a bare drive into an external usb port. i highly recommend one of these for $20 or $30 is you regularly get called upon by loved ones to fix their shit

with one of these you can do the swap to the new hard drive, hook the old one up with the adaptor, directly clone drive to drive (not partition to partition or it won’t boot) and then resize the partition and you are done.

and i’d like to say that microsoft licensing sucks! the fact that the license that i bought was for sp1 and i needed sp3 to get the install to work means the last machine that i worked on is now stuck with vista and is min spec on ram for win7.

Glad to hear it worked for you!

FIRESTORM_v1

Just f.y.i

It’s been a while so I went back through the process and did not get prompted for a password or get an authentication error when I su’ed to root. What version of clonezilla are you using? I’d like to see if I could replicate and I might be able to advise you better.

You may be able to achieve the same thing by running “sudo bash”. As long as “whoami” shows root then you should ok. Can you post some more details about your configuration so I can do more research?

As always, thank you for taking the time to comment on my article!

FIRESTORM_v1

I am so very happy that you were able to complete your upgrade! Thank you for letting me know that your external drive method was a success.

After reading about your drive copy time, I can understand why your copy didn’ take very long at all. A standard USB2 hard drive has about a 480Mbps transfer rate which is almost 5 times a standard network connection. With your estimate, had you been doing it over the network, it would have taken you about 2 1/2 to 3 hours to transfer it all.

I think that your use of the external drive is definately a life saver (ans a timesaver too).

I do thank you for writing back and hope you have fun with your upgraded hard drive.

FIRESTORM_v1

just want to tell you that I succseded. I took an external HDD (USB2), created a primary partition to be sure _where_ the image will be created and no data would damaged. I used “savedisk” to let CloneZilla write an image there. Than I swapped HDD’s, used the option “restoredisk” to write the data on the new disk and things were just fine.

And after all that has been written about the long time it would take to create a image, I was quite surprised about the speed: it only took about 30 minutes to create the image of my 60 GB HDD and another 30 minutes to write the image to the new HDD (500 GB).

To change the size of the partiton on the new HDD I just installed the program Partition Magic to get more allocatable space. Done.

Kind regards,

Martin