Transfering Hard Drives

[Chosonman]

I'm trying to add a 200 Gig Hard Drive to my system, but I don't want to have to reinstall Windows again. So I plan to copy all the contents of my old Hard Drive to the new one and use the new hard drive as my primary.

My question is, what are the risks associated with this? And can this be done without any rish of causing my system to crash.
Is there a safe tool I can use to do this painlessly? And does windows provide a tool for that automatically convert the content to the new hard drive.

Thanks

 

[BlueWeasel]

Windows does not have anything that can do that. Some drive manufacturers provide software free of charge that can do this for you if either the source or destination drives are that particular brand. Check the brand websites for details.

Done correctly, there are no risks associated with this. I've done this several times (using Ghost or True Image) with no problems.

Both Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image can do this easily, but they aren't free.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Usually the drive (if retail) inlcudes a disc with a cloning program. Otherwise I highly recommend Norton Ghost.

There are no issues assuming you clone the entire drive, and that your HDD controller supports a drive that size (some controllers have a 128Mb drive size limit). You must also have a minimum of WinXP SP1 or Win2K Pro SP3.

If BIOS recognizes the full size of the drive, and your OS meets the above specs, you're fine.

 

[Fisher999]

Originally posted by: FlyingPenguin
Usually the drive (if retail) inlcudes a disc with a cloning program. Otherwise I highly recommend Norton Ghost.

There are no issues assuming you clone the entire drive, and that your HDD controller supports a drive that size (some controllers have a 128Mb drive size limit). You must also have a minimum of WinXP SP1 or Win2K Pro SP3.

If BIOS recognizes the full size of the drive, and your OS meets the above specs, you're fine.

Another good third party software program for this task is Powerquest's "Drive Image" !!!