Changing Hard Drives

[BeachedWhale]

I hope a simple question!

I have a 35Gb hard drive which is full and is the C drive ( operating system drive)

I am going to install a 500Gb SATA drive (Motherboard compatable)

How do I simply transfer the contents of the small drive to the SATA drive and make it the C drive without having to re install all the operating systems?

Thanks

[green granite]

I suggest you read this article carefully first, and then google to find suitable software. Good luck.
Disk cloning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning)

[twiggs]

The free trial of Migrate Easy (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/) worked well for me on a previous laptop hard drive upgrade.

[Saab Dastard]

Cloning of an IDE disk to a SATA disk is likely to have 2 possible problems.

The first is being able to boot the system with the SATA drive recognised to load the cloned image onto it.

The second is getting the system to boot successfully from the SATA disk once the image has been transferred to it, as the image will have been created on an IDE system and will not, therefore have the SATA drivers loaded.

These may very well be handled elegantly by the cloning software, in which case you will have an easy transition, or not - in which case you may be struggling.

As I have not yet had dealings with IDE to SATA I would be very interested in your experience.

SD

[Keef]

I share some of SD's concern about SATA vs IDE..

My inclination would be to install the new big drive as drive D, and move all non-software stuff from C: to it. Assuming your 35GB isn't chock-full of software, you should find you can free up most of it.

Changing the address of your "My Documents" file to D:\Documents is not difficult - that will automate the process thereafter.

My machine (for long, boring historical reasons allied with apathy to change it all) has drives covering most of the alphabet. Drive C is 20GB, with about 7 GB free. It has a total of 800GB, that lot about half full.

If you have the installation software, you can even uninstall non-Windows software on C and reinstall it to drive D.

If you're worried about Drive C's age, buy a decent-quality IDE drive (80GB would be more than enough) and clone the existing Drive C to that.

[twiggs]

Agreed that the change to SATA normally has complications, but it should not be an issue because the SATA will be installed as a slave initially as part of the procedure with the Migrate Easy software as it is a Windows app and Windows will be running in the original disk when you start the procedure.. This should allow driver detection and installation in the present Windows install.
The software is very user friendly and it won't hurt to give it a go.


One thing to note, make sure you do not erase the data on the 30GB disk until you are sure it has all been successfully transferred to the big one.
This leaves the option to use it as a slave and install fresh XP on the SATA.

[Saab Dastard]

I'd go with Keef's suggestion - keep the existing C drive and move all data to the new one, assuming that you have physical space and power for 2 disks (and power cables, brackets etc.).

None of my XP PCs have C:drives larger than 40 GB - and none are half full, even with all the "My Documents" folders on C.

You can also easily create a Program Files folder on D: and install programs there as well (but you can't just copy & paste from C). Just bear permissions in mind if you are using NTFS with security enabled (IIRC you can't do that with XP home)

I would also suggest that you move the swap file to the bigger disk, deleting it from the existing, simply because it will be a faster disk - although it will also claw a couple of GB back on C.

And absolutely as Twiggs says, backup critical data before starting - you cannot be too careful!

SD

[rallymania]

have a root around in your BIOS on the new motherboard
on many modern motherboards the SATA controller has a "compatablity" mode that makes the SATA controller present as IDE to the OS and fools into think nothing has changed

that may make your transition to new drive simpler