It's possible, but like the others have said, it involves more work. You need to set up a master boot record (MBR) to boot the disk, and set up the Windows boot loader to boot from that disk, using BCDEdit. It's by no means difficult, but you need to know what you're doing. If you want to try it, follow these steps: Set up the partition scheme you want. ( Edit: Don't forget to mark the boot partition as active !) Run BootSect.exe on the new hard disk. I think the program can be found in C:\Boot\BootSect.exe . Let's say your new drive (as an external drive at the moment) shows up as E: on your computer; type this into the command prompt: 3. C:\Boot\BootSect.exe /nt60 /mbr E: Be especially careful to not accidentally do this to other drives! Now copy all the files over to the new drive (E:), ensuring that you also copy hidden and system files . Now use BCDEdit to fix the device and osdevice members of the E:\Boot\BCD...