How to upgrade Hard drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gerald Bramwell
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G

Gerald Bramwell

Hi,

I have a PC running Windows XP home SP2, I have two hard drives each of
80Gb with 3 partitions. I want to replace the primary drive with a
200+Gb drive again with 3 partitions. Will I have to re-install Windows
or can I put the now primary into slave and copy over the files? Will I
have to redo the Windows authorization?

Thanks
Gerald
 
Gerald Bramwell said:
Hi,

I have a PC running Windows XP home SP2, I have two hard drives each of
80Gb with 3 partitions. I want to replace the primary drive with a
200+Gb drive again with 3 partitions. Will I have to re-install Windows
or can I put the now primary into slave and copy over the files? Will I
have to redo the Windows authorization?

Thanks
Gerald
Click to expand...


you can use a utility such as Acronis

http://www.acronis.com/
 
It might be worth doing a fresh install to have a clean operating system,
though you'ld have to then download about 80 post-SP2 updates (around 170 Mb).
 
Thanks,

Both drives in the machine now have 48-bit Address ticked and the bare
PC (motherboard, case, processor and memory) is about 18 months old.
 
Gerald Bramwell said:
Thanks,

Both drives in the machine now have 48-bit Address ticked and the bare PC
(motherboard, case, processor and memory) is about 18 months old.
Click to expand...


Gerald:
As other responders to your query have indicated, it's assumed that your
basic objective is to "clone" the entire contents of your current
3-partitioned 80 GB HDD to your new 200 GB HDD so that the latter drive will
become your boot drive containing everything that's on the older drive
including the OS, your programs & applications, user-created data, etc.

Assuming that's what you want, you can accomplish this using a disk-to-disk
cloning program such as the Acronis one mentioned by one of the responders
to your query. In general, following the disk-cloning operation the
"destination" HDD, your new 200 GB HDD will contain the three partitions
just like your "source" disk, the 80 GB HDD. However, the size of the
resultant partitions will retain the same percentage of disk space as
allocated by the source disk. So that, for example, if your partition 1 of
your 80 GB source HDD occupies 50% of the disk space, and partition 2
occupies 30%, and partition 3 occupies 20%, those same percentages will
carry over to your 200 GB destination HDD. However, those percentages
affecting the destination HDD (the recipient of the clone) can easily be
manipulated by the user should he or she desire this.

While you could achieve your basic objective using the disk-to-disk copying
utility included with the retail version of a new HDD (and also generally
available as a download from the drive's manufacturer), you might want to
consider a commercial disk cloning program such as the Acronis one. Now that
you will have two HDDs in your system you might want to use that 80 GB HDD
as a comprehensive backup of your new 200 GB HDD. (We're assuming, of
course, that the capacity of that now-slave 80 GB drive would be sufficient
to hold the contents of your new 200 GB boot drive). For the most part these
commercial disk-cloning programs are much simpler to use and quicker in
operation than the utility provided by the hard disk manufacturer,
particularly when the former are being used as a routine backup system.

The disk-cloning program we've been recommending is the Casper 4.0 program.
We prefer it over the Acronis program as well as the many other disk-cloning
programs we've experienced. We recently provided details concerning the use
of this program in a 11/18 posting to the microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
newsgroup under the subject "Re: My miserable experience in testing and
"removing" the "Acronis [alleged] True Image 11 Home" Backup product." Take
a look at it if you're interested. Or I can re:post the info to this
newsgroup if you (or anyone else) is interested.
Anna
..
 
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