Clone Bootable Partition With All Software Installed To Other Partition Making It Bootable [Pictorial]

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Why Cloning: You have upgraded your operating system let’s say from Windows XP to Windows 7 or you have installed new but heavy software that the main primary drive does not has any space left. You got two options, either uninstall some software to make room or move the data to bigger drive through cloning. Uninstallation might not be a wise act, so we do cloning. In cloning the drive, you will create exact copy of your primary system drive by migrating all software installed including your operating system. Using free tool, XXClone (Freeware) could be a good choice to clone drives.

XXClone (v2.00.4) is available freeware as well as shareware. But here we will talk only about XXClone Freeware which is 10MB in size and installs just in seconds. With simple interface, selecting only source and destination drives, you give it a GO and within few minutes, cloning is done. It took only 3 minutes to clone 4GB data. You do not need to burn any CD/DVD for cloning operation like in some software you have to. It works on Windows XP (x86, x64), Windows Vista (x86, x64), Windows 7 (x86, x64).

Here I will show you how you can create a bootable clone drive of your primary drive or system drive where your operating system is installed. This cloning process is only of four steps.

Clone Primary Drive: Download XXClone from the following web address and install it.

http://www.xxclone.com/

Now Run XXClone. On the main screen you will see Source Volume and Target Volume. Select source drive in Source Volume and target drive in Target Volume. We select C: as Source Volume which is also system drive by default. Now press button Start.

XXClone will ask your confirmation.

After confirming the action, it will start cloning your system drive (C:) to targeted drive.

After finishing the cloning, XXClone will ask you to make it bootable if you want. Press OK. If XXClone closes it window, reopen it.

Make Clone Drive Bootable: As you have cloned C: which is Windows System drive, you may like to make the new clone drive bootable. Go to Cool Tools tab and press button Make Bootable.

A new window will open where you will check all the three checkboxes: Write MBR, Write BootSector and Write BOOT.INI.

Again, you will be asked to confirm your action and just do it by pressing button Yes.

The clone drive is made bootable now. After the operation complete, Exit to exit.

Final Step: Restart your computer and you will be asked to select one OS to select. The first Windows link is your old Windows and the 2nd link is from your cloned window. As you want to see that everything is done perfectly, selecting 2nd OS link to boot is OK.

On desktop, you will see a notice congratulating you that cloning is done perfectly. If you don’t see this message, run XXClone and this message should appear.

Congratulations, you have successfully cloned your Windows System drive. Now you can do any modifications in your old drive: format it, resize it, delete it and create new partition or whatever you want.

Things To Know: There are one or two extra things which you might need to know.

1: When you start your Windows from clone drive, it will be shown as your Windows System drive. This means if Windows was installed on C:, the new clone drive will be shown as C: and C: will be shown as the other drive.
2: You may need to duplicate volume ID which can be done through Cool Tools.
3: On website, they say “Good for one-time migration of Windows disk to a larger disk” but I have used it almost 10 times and there was not limited use warning.
4: You can only clone the whole drive.
5: You can clone any drive.
6: In one time, you can clone only one drive.
7: HyberSync Algorithm is only available in XXClone Pro.
8: You can schedule the cloning task through Cool Tools tab. All information will be provided on-screen.
9: If you need to resize you drives, you can use Windows own Disk Management utility which can be launched through XXClone interface.
10: It may you need to reinstall some of your software like Microsoft Office, etc.

I hope this pictorial will be helpful for you to do cloning by yourself. But, if you need any assistance, we are here. If you have used any other software for cloning, let us know. It will helpful for all to know much.