Is there a easy cheap solution

Newbie Forum
#1

I have two hard drives in my computer one 80gb and one 20 gb. both drives have about 5gb free.

The 20 gb drive houses XP pro. I want to replace the 20 gb drive with a 200gb drive.

Is there a way to do it without any extra equipment?

can I burn the contents of the 20gb drive onto dvd’s then put them back on the new 200gb drive?

Is there an easy solution to this?

#2

Yo-

Suggest getting Acronis True Image (about $25 from Newegg at www.newegg.com)-

Remove the 80gb drive - replace with the new 200gb drive - format the new drive and use the ‘clone drive’ feature of Acronis True Image to clone from the 20gb drive to the new 200gb drive - remove the old 20gb drive and replace with the new 200gb drive - and reinstall the 80gb drive - preferrably as the ‘slave’ to the new ‘master’ 200gb drive-eh!

(being really careful to read all the instructions first - and having a copy handy for referrence)

#3

The drive manufacturer often has a tool which handles drive migration, saves buying extra software.

#4

bigmike, that sounds very easy to do. Have you done this, and used Acronis True Image in this way, and gotten all your executables, shortcuts, directories, etc. to be in exactly the same spots, and have nothing missing? Would just like to know, as I too would like to do something similar, as I have a 40 gb and 100 gb drive, and would love to chunk the 40 gb for a larger one, like a 160 or 200 gb. :wink: Let me know here… :wink:

#5

Yo Quema34-

Have not personally done this - but if you read the posts from others in CDF - they have done this successfully with Acronis True Image-

I personally would not chuck the old drive until I was confident that the new one worked as it should-

Also I would carefully and completely defrag, optimize and clean the registry of the old drive [I]before[/I] doing this cloning-

I have however - again using Acronis True Image - backed up a complete image of the old drive to an external drive - verified the image - installed and formatted the new drive - and restored the image to the new drive - very successfully I may add-eh!

(also - there may be some merit in using a disk drive manufacturers software - if you are say going from a Seagate old drive to a Seagate new drive - though I personally have never done this)

#6

bigmike7,

As Matth pointed out above, you do not need Acronis True Image to do what do you want. HD manufacturers (Seagate, for instance) have free utilities which will do exactly this.

Acronis True Image is a very good application (I have a registered version) which do much more than what you want.

GB

#7

The makers utility normally requires that ONE o0f the drives natches, so if migrating from a Maxtor to a Seagate (for example), you could use the Maxtor OR the Seagate utility. in some cases, it may only need the drive to be present, not even the source or destination.

#8

For those wondering if it would work as bigmike described it, it should. I’ve pulled the hard drive out of my laptop, attached it to my desktop via IDE-to-USB thingy, made an image of the drive with Acronis, then grabbed a new, bigger hard drive, hooked it up to the IDE-to-USB device, wrote the image to it, extended the partition with PartitionMagic (maybe Acronis could do this, but I didn’t really look for it), and plugged the new drive into my laptop. Everything worked perfectly.