Question : Clone Windows 7 to new drive

Hi, Ive been playing with Windows 7 ultimate 32bit. I installed it on an old drive and found I like it. I now want to move it to my main hard disk. I tried using HD Clone, which has worked to a point - the drive works fine, Win 7 boots to the user profile screen, but then just says preparing your desktop. If you manually start explorer, there is some text in the bottom right saying this copy of windows is not genuine (it is a genuine activated copy).

I assume this is something to do with windows 7 realising it's been moved to a new disk.

Does anyone know how to clone a windows 7 drive and still have it work? I dont really want to re-install all the apps and settings on a new Win 7 install if I can help it.

Answer : Clone Windows 7 to new drive

Hi, thanks guys, but i've fixed this issue now.

The problem was that when i first installed Win 7 on my small drive, i plugged my normal drive in a s secondary... THe clone onto the nromal drive had a registry setting which was making the cloned copy mount the drive as d: not c:

to fix this you first need to figuere out what the drive has been mounted as (try loading task manager and start new task. click the browse button and you can see the drive letter it's using. in my case it was mounting the drive as d:
You then need to get to regedit (i could only achieve this in safe mode) and open the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevies

this key has a list of the drive letters. Change the \DosDevices\c: key name to any other NON USED drive letter, then change the key name for the currently mounted drive letter, to c...

for my example, i had to :
1) rename\DosDevices\C:  to \DosDevices\x:
2) rename \DosDevices\D:   to \DosDevices\c:

after a reboot it is now working like a dream. it also autoamtically re-activated WIndows (wasn't even connected to the internet).

hope this helps someone out.