Boot-It Bare Metal: resize drive c for Win7

Some notes about decisions when using Boot-It Bare Metal from Terabyte Unlimited.

Objective: backup everything then resize drive C to make more space for Windows 7 64-bit. Window7 used up all of 40gb but there was enough space on the internal hard disk to make "D" smaller and "C" larger. The core steps are described here in the official documentation.

Note: XXCopy was first used to clone all files on D to an external SATA drive I:.

setlocal
set targ=I:\BAK_D
REM xxcopy target is %targ%
pause
cd /d d:\Apps\Utilities\XXCopy\64bit
XXCOPY d:\ %targ%\ /clone /oNc:\myclonelog.txt /oS3 /oD3 /oE3 /oI1 /FF
pause

The Boot-It Bare Metal license was purchased, and then MAKEDISK was run on Windows to create the necessary media. Here are the MAKEDISK screens with choices shown. The user manual is HERE and does a pretty good job of explaining things. These are here to give a real-world example.

Now to find out whether the system will successfully boot to this USB flash disk... Looks like F11 is the key to use to boot from USB on the Sony VAIO...

Documentation for Image for DOS choices is HERE .

Writing to the external SATA drive via direct SATA: fails within the first minute. This is not too surprising since SATA support from Sony+Intel has been unreliable on this laptop all along. It was a long-shot to see whether the built-in SATA support could write to the external drive. Ah well.

Writing to the external GoFlex drive using the USB connector instead of the SATA driver: succeeds .

Everything else goes according to the documentation. Resize volume, slide, slide, resize data partition to make it 40gb smaller, then finally resize the Windows OS partition to make it 40gb larger. That whole process took a few hours. Afterwards, Windows 7 booted without much fuss. It detected "possible errors" on the external disk but in actual fact, found nothing to fix.