Making win7 bootable before installtion

[Brian Davison]

I'm replacing the hard drive in my Dell laptop with an SSD
Dell use this system where the actual C: drive has no boot sector, and is the second partition on thier drive - the first being a hidden one with recovery stuff and the BCD stuff, telling it to boot from C: (and presumably identifying C: - you cant copy the dell partition even if you want to so no chance of replicating the Dell setup on the new disk. (Wouldn't want to either - stick with standard setup)

I want to create a normal boot disk (one partition). Ive taken a disk image of the c:drive, restored to the single partition on the SSD (mouted as an eSATA) on my desktop) but of course that installation has no BCD etc.

can I now used Easy BCD to put the necessary boot files on there ready to fit it to the laptop and boot up?

The Desktop is running windows XP only - is that an issue? can easy BCD still put a win 7 boot setup on the plugged in drive?

If that won't work, what will?

 

[Terry60]

Please see reply in your other thread, and please don't open multiple threads for the same incident. It's much easier to keep track of all the detail in one place.