Hard drive Related

[Tonstir]

Hey, so I've been on this forum for a while now and I built my computer with help from some people. Today, I would like to know how you switch your operating system and some files on to a new hard drive. I bought a new one that is faster that I want to use for bootup and some programs, and I want to use my other one as storage. So can someone give me the rundown on what I have to do. Thanks

 

[corkyg]

You clone your old drive to the new one. It should create a fully bootable larger drive - Acronis TI will do proportional cloning. When you have that done, you cam reformat the old drive to be a storage drive.

If you are also migrating to a new OS, such as Windows 7, you might be better off doing a clean install and reinstalling the selected software you want.

 

[Frosty192]

Yes, use Ghost or True Image to copy your existing boot drive to your new drive, then use your old one for backups. I bought a nice USB2 external enclosure for my old HDD and now I use it to backup all my other computers.

 

[SickBeast]

You can use a Ubuntu livecd. It's as simple as typing this into a terminal:

sudo apt-get install gddrescue
ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb (provided that "sda" is your current hard drive and "sdb" is the new one - you can find out by typing "sudo fdisk-l")

It seems to copy the files at 60mb/sec or so which isn't bad. It took me about an hour to clone my 320gb drive. The nice thing is that it's free.