Simple hard drive transfer question

DragonPup

The Background: The oldest things in my PC are my 2 hard drives. The system drive is a 7 some odd year old 60 gig IDE drive, and the second is a 4ish year old 180gig SATA drive. Both are getting rather full, and with Windows 7 approaching, I figure I should move to a nice, new, and fast hard drive

The Question: Is there is nice and simple way to move all the data from the 60 gig system drive to a new hard drive so everything will be there exactly as it is now? Copying the files from the second drive is a simple copy paste, but I am not so sure when it comes to the system folders and such.

Bonus Question: How are Western Digital drives these days? I figured since the last one I bought 7 years ago still performs fine that I'd consider them again for the new drive.

Thanks!

Buttcleft

I can't reccomend any particular software to do it since I've not really used any, but I can point you in the right direction.

You want a drive ghosting or drive cloning program.

Kyanilis

Ghosting/Cloning is the only way to do it without breaking everything. I personally know that at my school we use Norton Ghost, but things like this cost money. In most situations I'd recommend you copy all your important data and then reinstall Windows and your programs, besides, it'll clean up any cobwebs that might be sitting around on your old hard drive. I know I can't go a few months without ending up with plenty of stuff just taking up room for whatever reason.

DragonPup

When I moved, some of my software CDs were misplaced in the transition. The XP CD was one of them.

matt has a problem

If you're planning to upgrade to Win7 anyway, why not just wait to buy a new drive then? It's only 5 months away. Prices are literally dropping weekly. Once Win7 is out, buy a copy and a new drive, install it on the new drive, then just copy all the files you want to keep off the old ones, and reformat the old drives.

MisterGrok

Western Digital is good, depending on who you ask, different people tend to have problems with different types of drives but they seem to be getting the best reviews on Newegg lately.

If you want to move everything over exactly as it is, Ghost is probably the best way. However, since you plan on getting a new OS soon, I think it's best for you to just back up your important files and wait until Win7 comes out and do a fresh install and copy everything over.

KurnDerak

As I had this problem, one very strong warning when copying Hard Drives. If you don't do it right there is a chance of having it copy everything, including the information about the hard drive itself. Me and my brother turned two 250 GB hard drives into 60 GB hard drives learning this. There is software to restore this but I can't remember it off the top of my head.

After that warning, I would recommend Western Digital. I have had 3 different HDs from them in the past 5 years or so (from upgrading slowly) and not a single one has had any sign of problem and they get a lot of use. Not much writing, as I don't do much that does a lot of writing, but a sure hell of a lot of reading as I can be up to 12-16 hours on the comp a day a lot of the time. As well, the Western Digital Hard Drive software is quite good for cloning and so forth. Just pop in the disk, load it before start up and you can do all of your copying and partitioning very easily.

I would also agree to wait until you get Win 7 and just do a fresh install then copy stuff.

Seattle Thread

matthasaproblem wrote: »

If you're planning to upgrade to Win7 anyway, why not just wait to buy a new drive then? It's only 5 months away. Prices are literally dropping weekly. Once Win7 is out, buy a copy and a new drive, install it on the new drive, then just copy all the files you want to keep off the old ones, and reformat the old drives.

Yeah, do this.

Kyanilis

Or if it is that big of a deal acquire the Windows 7 RC and install that.

DragonPup

Kyanilis wrote: »

Or if it is that big of a deal acquire the Windows 7 RC and install that.

Well, I don't need this done tomorrow or anything like that. I figured if there was a nice simple method I might as well get a jump on it sooner than later. Although it is tempting to upgrade to the official RC now... (mmm...64 bit support)

Tamin

I just did this with a free app called CloneHD. Or HDClone; I forget and am very far from home at the moment.

It included a bit where it automatically partitioned the new HD so I didn't waste any space. Of course, this process took 5 hours, and afterwards, the new HD wouldn't boot up; some issue with the registry. The second cloning (which I don't think I did anything differently, but I must have) worked.

There was a reference early in the process to needing 'exclusive' [I think] access to the old HD to make the process work, but after booting up into the recovery console and making things as simple as possible, this message still popped up, so I ended up ignoring it; the second time, I simply performed the clone during normal operation, and had no problems.

Does Windows 7 need to completely reformat everything, or can it 'upgrade' XP and/or Vista? Genuinely curious, as I have a lot of little files and programs that I'm not sure I can track down again if I lose them.