Installing a new hard drive

D

dmonkey

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 14, 2004
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I don't consider myself a tech guru or anything, but I am pretty proficient at technology.

However, I need some help with this situation.

I have a much slower hard drive in one of my computers and I recently bought a brand new 400GB drive with 16mb of cache. I still want to use my old hard drive, but is there any way I can get windows to "transfer" over to the new drive? As in having the windows files and all be on my newer, faster hard drive instead of my old one?
 
Simple answer:

Use a decent drive imaging program to take an image of your exisiting installation, make a partition on your new drive to restore it to and configure BIOS and your drives to ensure that partition is your boot partition, and then restore the drive image to it.


But 'best practice' is to simply remove the old drive, have the new one as your boot drive and install Windows and your software to it fresh, clean and appropriately updated, and then pop your old drive back in, move your data to where it needs to go and then format the old drive to reclaim the storage space.
 
Great, thanks!

I would go with a clean install but I'm too lazy and the machine I'm working on isn't very performance dependent.

What would your recommendation be for a good drive imaging program? (preferably free)
 
I personally don't believe there is such a (good) thing for free. Not when it comes to migrating your system installation, anyway. But quite decent commercial ones aren't all that expensive, and if it helps you avoid the hassle...........

Edit: Drive Image is as good as any. Acronis TrueImage is also pretty good.
 
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