Change of hard drive - cloning/restoring with BartPE/DriveImageXML

The following is not particularly ground breaking, just a note to self on how to do a HDD (hard disk drive) backup and restore as hassle-free as possible. My choice of tool was a BartPE CD that I built including the disk cloning tool DriveImageXML (or DIX) as a plugin.

Making the clone file was the easy part - DIX simply lets you make a clone file to a USB drive from within a running Windows OS. Getting the new HDD to boot after restoring the clone file to it was a little trickier. This is what I ended up doing

1. Install DIX on the old drive running Windows, then creating a backup (clone) of the whole partition to a file on a USB hard drive. Yes, you can actually do that while Windows is running off of the same disk!
   
2. Removed the old HDD and installed the new HDD in the computer (since it was a laptop with only one HDD bay, I did not have the option of leaving the old one in until the data was transferred).
3. Partitioning was a little tricky. Unless you find a partitioning plugin for BartPE, you will have to do it from some other bootable media. I first tried an old Win98 command-line bootable CD, which only formatted around 130Gb (my drive was 160). I ended up booting into a Knoppix Linux boot CD and create a standard, active (=bootable) partition by running its fdisk from a command shell after issuing a su to gain administrator access. The partition was marked as a Linux type partition, which does not matter since DIX will overwrite it anyway, it just does not know how to create the partition. I might also have created the partition by booting into a Windows installation CD, creating the partition and then abort further installation.
4. Now booting into the BartPE CD, I ran DIX again on the new disk, restoring the image from my USB disk. To get Bart to see the USB disk, make sure that it is on and connected already at boot.
   
5. Booting from the new disk was the trickiest. When attempting to boot from the new disk, only a blank black page with a blinking cursor appeared. I had to boot into the Windows installation disk and choose Recovery console. From there, I ran fixboot, fixmbr and bootcfg /rebuild. Seems like my hard drive lacked both a working master boot record (MBR) and because my old disk had a utility partition that I had not bothered taking with me, the partition entry in boot.ini was also wrong.

Finally, my new disk booted with all the old data and programs as it was before.