UEFI Support in Windows 7?

"Todd" wrote in message
...
On 02/19/2014 04:11 PM, W wrote:
"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message

My problem is I have an MBR disk with a bootable Windows 7 64-bit OS on
it.
I take that disk and image copy the System Partition and the Boot
Partition
to a new device. I mark System Partition as Active. When I attempt
to
boot that from the new computer, it fails to see a bootable partition.
I
just don't get it. I would totally understand it starting to boot and
then failing on some device driver mismatch. That's not this case.
It
never starts to boot. It refuses to see the device as a valid boot
image,
no matter whether I start in BIOS or UEFI modes.



Try cloning the *whole thing* (disk to disk) with CloneZilla.
Then see what you get and change things as desired. The
new disk need to be the same size or larger than the original.
(There are way around that if need be.)

http://www.clonezilla.org/

Cloning the whole disk works. Although I don't understand why the target
needs to be larger. Using Acronis Disk Director to do the copy, if the
target is smaller it insists on changing the sizes of the partitions.
Since the Microsoft System Partition needs to be exactly 100 GB that isn't
desirable. I ended up copying the disk, allowing the resizing, then:

1) Resizing System Partition to 100 GB
2) Moving the actual boot partition to end of the System Partition
3) Shrinking down the boot partition

I don't understand why a disk cloning tool couldn't just copy the real
partitions to a smaller device, as long as the smaller device has room for
those partitions (mine did).

The resulting layout appears to boot. I did have to perform the trick of
getting into the registry of that system and removing the MountedDevices
entry for C:\ in order for the new boot drive to be assigned drive letter
C:.

--
W

On Wednesday, February 12, 2014 12:49:33 AM UTC-5, W wrote:
Does Windows 7 support the need UEFI replacement for BIOS? If yes, does

this require 64-bit Windows 7? Does it require the system partition and

boot partition to both be on a GPT disk?



I have a Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit boot partition working on an old Dell

computer. That computer's BIOS says nothing about UEFI. When I try to

copy over the image of the system partition and boot partition to a a Dell

T7600 system - which DOES offer UEFI boot devices as an option - and try to

boot in legacy mode, I get a message that I am trying to boot a UEFI device

in legacy mode. Unfortunately, that device does NOT show up in the list of

boot devices. When I select the device 0 on the boot controller, I get a

message that the partition cannot be booted (without any details).



If I go into the Dell T7600 setup and configure it to use UEFI, that is more

confusion. If I try to add a UEFI device, it tells me "No file system".

If I simply enable UEFI without adding a boot device, it finds nothing on

startup.



So at the end of the day, I have an exact image copy of a bootable WIndows 7

64-bit OS, and I cannot get it to boot in either legacy mode or in UEFI

mode. Since I have no experience with UEFI, I am just lost here.



P.S., I was copying over the Windows disk image just to bootstrap install

process, and I was going to relicense the OS once it booted.



--

W

Some cloning software adjusts to the differing hard drive capacities and/or partition sizes. In my experience, Clonezila does not do too well. One of its issues is that it does not optimize partition placement when the target drive is an SSD. The other is that it refuses to clone a partition onto a drive lacking capacity for the partition, and it does not resize partitions on the fly. Still, it is useful for what it does.

Last week, I gave a laptop with a 320GB drive to someone to use on a trial basis. The trial was somewhat successful, but they wanted an 128GB SSD instead. This became tricky. Windows 7 does, at least, offer the possibility to resize partitions, but I could not get it to resize the main Windows partition down below 128GB. I ran some software (MyDefrag) to shove all the files to the beginning blocks of the partition. No joy. Why? Because the Windows restore file cannot be moved. Solution was a South Park moment, I learned something today. ****I shut off restore points, which deleted the unmovable file, and I was able to resize the partition smaller than the magic 128GB SSD capacity.**** Thereafter, no problem cloning. However, I did use Minitool's Partition Wizard 7 from the HiRen's 15.2 CD to do the cloning. Once I was done, I booted the system with the SSD, re-enabled restore points (like seat belts and an air bag for crapola Windows updates), and delivered the system to my customer... Ben Myers