Easy question: Best way to transfer files for HDD upgrade

EPS Sniper

Gawd
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I want to upgrade the current 40gb 7200rpm (only 2mb cache) harddrive I have with something bigger and faster (I was thinking 80gigs and 8mb cache). However, I was wondering what would be the best way to transfer several large folders at once.

The reason I am asking this is because my music folder is at around 5gb. To back this up on cd would take more than 7 cds, plus I dont want to risk the cds being burned badly. I was thinking about hooking up the new drive, formatting it, installing xp, etc, then hook up the other drive as slave, transfer the files, then format the old drive so that I can have an extra 40gb of storage. Does all of this make sense? Also, will I slow down my new drive by having a drive with 2mb of cache connected?

Any help is really appreciated. If I put this in the wrong forum, please feel free to move it.

Thanks :)
 
Maxtor has a kickass utility called MaxBlast.....

You can download a bootable ISO of it from their support website.

Basically you put both HD's in the system, boot off the CD and it has a section to do a perfect copy/image onto your new drive.

I've used it on several systems and it works perfectly.

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/?epi_menuItemID=3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068&epi_menuID=976d37cd478c5826433f226075b46068&epi_baseMenuID=976d37cd478c5826433f226075b46068&channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software%20Downloads/ATA%20Hard%20Drives&downloadID=19
 
Well then, you will LOVE this......

Western Digital has one as well.....:D

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools

The downloadable Data Lifeguard Tools now comes in both DOS and Windows versions and was written specifically for the installation of Western Digital EIDE hard drives. If your computer system already has a hard drive installed with an operating system of Windows 98SE or greater, you should use the Windows version of Data Lifeguard for best results. The DOS version is required if installing a hard drive in a new system without existing operating system support.
  • New features:
  • Certified to work on all current WD drives (model numbers starting with "WD")
  • Friendly user interface and easy to use
  • GUI Interface Drive Installation Software
  • Printable tutorial customized to help you optimize your configuration
  • Improved drive to drive copy capability
  • (Windows version) Will work with Windows 2000 SP3 and Windows XP SP1 to overcome the 137GB barrier without the need for a controller card
 
Thats pretty badass. Right now I have a Maxtor, so I'll probably use the maxtor software if I get another drive, but if I get a WD drive, I'll give the other a shot.

Thanks for the help! :)
 
the WD definately checks and the Maxtor probaably checks for a matching brand drive inorder to work ;)

in the evnt there are niether
the Ultimate Boot CD has 2 freeware utilities
HDClone is a rudimentary clone utility
and g4u a very powerful one, but with a learning curve

for advanced imaging, cloning and casting with a huge amount of control via switches
its hard to beat Symantec's Corporate Edition of Ghost
 
A Knoppix CD will also work. 'dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb', assuming that your existing disk is identified as hda and the new one is hdb. You can check via fdisk (the new drive won't be partitioned yet) -- just print out the partition table and exit without writing changes. Knoppix doesn't care what type of drive it is. :D
 
If you are buying a new "retail" hd then pretty much all of them come with drive cloning software of some kind or another. look around the cd or floppy that comes with the drive. I think I have used just about all of them. They all work OK as long as 1 of the drives is from the manufacturer that you got the software from.
 
Any idea how you do this for a HD in a notebook?? --- there is no way you could connect 2 HDs in the notebook.
 
Ghost supports firewire and USB as do a few others
or over a network as well
 
Ice Czar said:
Ghost supports firewire and USB as do a few others
or over a network as well
That's how I did it. But, even for a USB2.0, it took Ghost 5 hours to back up and create a copy of 13G of my 30G HD! Hope things will improve for Ghost
 
while Ghost aint speedy (the compression level is also key)
niether is USB in most implementations
that would have been considerably better in Gigabit ethernet or ATA
 
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