need guide on cloning dual boot to larger drive

[babag]

i've had a dual boot hackintosh running for quite a while (mavericks/w7-64pro). it's been on a 250gb ssd and i have a new 500gb ssd i'd like to clone it to. i did a test using clonezilla and was able to get it to boot both systems but i could not take advantage of the new space. clonezilla simply cloned the drive with its partitions remaining at the same size as they'd always been. when i tried resizing the partitions i lost the ability to boot into windows. also lost access to the bootcamp utilities in mavericks. got an error there that i needed to update some firmware before i could run bootcamp.

edit:
looks like i never had access to bootcamp as i just booted to mavericks on the original drive and get the same error.
/edit

anybody got any pointers on cloning a dual boot system to a larger drive?

thanks,
BabaG

 

[babag]

well. some progress but only a little. i can migrate from the smaller to the larger drive but only if i do an exact clone, leaving the various partitions the same size as they were on the smaller drive. that sort of defeats the purpose, though.

i had some success by using the built-in w7 disk management tool to resize the windows partition. it is the last partition on the drive so there was a lot of free space following it. i was able to extend the w7 partition to take advantage of this space and the drive remains bootable. that's an improvement. before this, whenever i tried any resizing, using linux tools like gparted, the windows partition became unbootable. it's not a solution i consider usable yet, though, as it only works for the w7 partition. what i really want is to divide the free space between the mavericks and w7 partitions. this will require moving the w7 partition to free space before it while leaving additional space following. the following space needs to then be absorbed by the w7 partition. after that i can look for a way to expand the mavericks partition.

sigh.

any thoughts on how to go about any of this?

thanks,
BabaG

 

[Going Bald]

well. some progress but only a little. i can migrate from the smaller to the larger drive but only if i do an exact clone, leaving the various partitions the same size as they were on the smaller drive. that sort of defeats the purpose, though.

i had some success by using the built-in w7 disk management tool to resize the windows partition. it is the last partition on the drive so there was a lot of free space following it. i was able to extend the w7 partition to take advantage of this space and the drive remains bootable. that's an improvement. before this, whenever i tried any resizing, using linux tools like gparted, the windows partition became unbootable. it's not a solution i consider usable yet, though, as it only works for the w7 partition. what i really want is to divide the free space between the mavericks and w7 partitions. this will require moving the w7 partition to free space before it while leaving additional space following. the following space needs to then be absorbed by the w7 partition. after that i can look for a way to expand the mavericks partition.

sigh.

any thoughts on how to go about any of this?

thanks,
BabaG

Try formatting your new larger drives the way you want.
Extend the Windows partition to exactly the same size as the new drive Windows partition. Clone the Windows and get it booting on the new drive.
On the old drive, extend the OS X partition the same way, even if you have to delete the Windows partition to do it. Now clone the OS X partition to the new drive partition.

 

[babag]

thanks for the ideas, gb.

can't resize the windows on the original drive as there's not space to do so. that's why the new drive. also, VERY reluctant to make any changes to my original drive, like enlarging windows, deleting windows, enlarging osx. my general practice is to keep the original unchanged and move to something larger. that way the original serves as a backup. also, with my current extremely low success rate in this arena, i definitely don't want to take a chance of mucking up the original.

so far i have been able to successfully clone the original to the larger drive but only if i keep all of the partitioning as is. osx is first on the drive and windows follows. i can successfully enlarge the windows partition to fill the drive as long as i keep the start point the same. that gives me more space than i actually need for windows and denies the ability of expanding osx. may be the best soluition, though.

if i move the windows partition to make room for more osx space, windows becomes unrecoverably unbootable. i get more room for osx that way but i lose windows. not a viable solution.

i guess, at this point, what i'm looking for is a workable methodology for moving windows farther down the drive and recovering it's bootability. tried MANY things but no luck as yet (original install disk repair options, linux recovery options, systemrescuecd, clonezilla, bootrec, blah blah blah). editing efi seems very daunting.

thanks again,
BabaG