Installing Windows on USB Drive

[zoobernut]

When I get a chance I will take some screenshots. I have looked at three different machines recently that I was working on two laptops running win 7 and one running win 8 and all three had the boot/main partition sandwiched between the EFI system partition and the recovery partition. This complicates the idea of boosting the size of the main partition since you can't expand a partition in the middle.

[Jamison]

IMO, if you have an image you may not care about the recovery partition. Restore to the image in a worst case scenario.

[zoobernut]

Just an update. I think I figured it out (this method works for me as long as I am migrating to a new SSD or HDD that is larger. I use a straight clone to move everything over. Then I delete any partitions that are not the main boot partitions that are to the right of the main boot partition. (usually the recovery partition) then I resize the main partition to take up more space still leaving enough for the deleted partitions. Then I copy the partitions from the old drive back over to the new drive manually.

This works using the partition tools that I have.

I still have to figure out how to do this on the computer that has a 640 gb spinning disk that I want to migrate to a 500gb SSD. (The extra space isn't needed the internal drive is barely used.)

[Niya]

easy: shrink the windows partition from within windows before cloning. As long as not too much space is in use you can usually shrink the partition by about 50%.

[zoobernut]

I bought a program from Acronis that does everything I need it to do called Disk Director. It allowed me to create a bootable USB and when I boot up to it I can move, create, shrink, grow, etc. partitions. It also allows me to clone whole disks. It even dynamically adjusts partition sizes to fill a larger disk. (this isn't the most accurate as it gave too much space to the recovery partition but only by 500mb).

It works really great.