Cloning a windows system disk

[ingvare]

I am running 2 Windows 7 under an Esxi VM at a data center. I needed to increase the system disk on one of them and decided to do it by cloning the windows disk to a larger disk.

This worked fine. Except for one thing. Since I was cloning the disk I got the old bootrecord on the new disk and it pointed to the old disk. Not good.

Tried to find a program so I could change the bootrecord. Tried a few but found none that could do the job. If I remember correctly the boot record has a pointer to the disk (by number) so another idea I got was to change place between the 2 disks in VM (Like switching place of physical disks) .Even if I am good at HW and SW my competence on VM is "beginner" so I would like an opinion from someone who knows better if this is a workable solution. And if it is, how to go about it. I handle more "normal" changes on VM by accessing it from the web interface. Or if someone has experience from a program that could be used to change the info so that boot is performed from the new disk.

From a windy and a bit cold Stockolm, Sweden

[continuum]

This should not require any external tools at all.
If you can boot into recovery mode the tool bcedit should be able to fix your issue.

[ingvare]

Thanks for answering. What do you mean by "recovery mode". I can boot the system normally, The thing is it will boot from the old system disk. I can access the new disk running from the old disk. Will bcedit be of any help fixing the boot info on the new disk?

[ingvare]

OK. I got the BCEdit running showing me a lot of info. It seems that I have some reading to do. Many params. Unknown descriptions of disks, like Harddiskvolume5. BootManager entry says HarddiskVolume1 and BootLoader says HardDiskVolume5. I assume  one is the place of the bootloader and the other is the one to actually boot from.

It seems like the enumerations of these volumes corresponds to the 5 disks I have on my 3 physical drives.

So the BootManager points to "System Reserved" on my old windows disk and the Bootloader points at my new windows directory on my new disk.

Makes sense

Seems like I should change the BootManager to Volume 4 which is "System Reserved" on my new disk. If it fails I can always change the bios to point to my old windows disk to boot from, The key question is if I can start the BCEdit on a disk that is not the disk I start from if I make a mistake

[continuum]

When you clone the bootable disk of a Windows VM you should NOT leave the original disk inside the VM on first reboot after the clone.
Instead you should replace the disk configured as scsi0:0 before you reboot.
Having both disks available on first boot often switches driveletters for the second disk which can be tricky to repair.
If you do not do that you can switch the bootorder in the virtual BIOS but that is the second best approach.

Windows 7 has a rescue mode that loads a small commandline only system into RAM so you should be able to make adjustments to the bootloader via the bcedit.exe tool.

[ingvare]

Thanks all.

I gave up on this approach and extended my old system disk instead. Was simpler than I had thought.

This tread can be closed and solved