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Swapping the system drive without losing data?

Joined
Jul 4, 2006
Messages
24
I have a 7 year old 5400 rpm IDE hard drive. I recently upgraded my pc to an athlon 64 3500 with 1 gig memory and I assume that the hard drive is slowing down my pc. Is there a relatively easy way to swap the current system drive (which only has 20gb used up) with a 36.7 gb 10,000 rpm raptor?

I wasn't sure if I could just hook it up to my pc as a slave, do a backup of my entire system drive onto the raptor, and then toss the old drive and just boot from the new one. If I can't do that, any other way?
 
alonzomourning23 said:
I have a 7 year old 5400 rpm IDE hard drive. I recently upgraded my pc to an athlon 64 3500 with 1 gig memory and I assume that the hard drive is slowing down my pc. Is there a relatively easy way to swap the current system drive (which only has 20gb used up) with a 36.7 gb 10,000 rpm raptor?

I wasn't sure if I could just hook it up to my pc as a slave, do a backup of my entire system drive onto the raptor, and then toss the old drive and just boot from the new one. If I can't do that, any other way?

That depends on if you're familar with ghost or acronis (or other imaging programs). If you phsically copy all the data from one drive to another, it most likely will not boot. My recommendation is always to reinstall the OS and apps, and copy the rest of the data over. The other methods may cause you more headache.
 
You could copy all of the data over from your old drive to the new drive, but that would only work if you booted into an OS that wasn't running on either of the drives. Then, after that's complete, you would have to write a new MBR to the new drive.

However, like the poster above said, It's much less of a headache to use ghosting utilities.
 
I don't want to reinstall the operating system and the apps. Much of this stuff has been in use for years and some of it I'd have to repurchase due to losing the disks. I have no problem doing a repair install, but would choose to just keep it as is over doing a fresh install.

All the standalone stuff is on another drive. The stuff that's on my main drive is the OS and programs that can't simply be copied by moving one folder.

I'm not familiar with ghost or any of those, is it relatively easy to do? And is it cheap?
 
alonzomourning23 said:
I don't want to reinstall the operating system and the apps. Much of this stuff has been in use for years and some of it I'd have to repurchase due to losing the disks. I have no problem doing a repair install, but would choose to just keep it as is over doing a fresh install.

All the standalone stuff is on another drive. The stuff that's on my main drive is the OS and programs that can't simply be copied by moving one folder.

I'm not familiar with ghost or any of those, is it relatively easy to do? And is it cheap?

Relatively easy? I'd say yes, but I've been working with it for years (ghost). Acronis TrueImage has a free trial period, and will still take some getting used to.

The problem is with the Windows SID, when you image, you have to use Sysprep to generate a new SID, which is why just straight up copy+paste doesn't work.

You'll spend almost as much time learning to create and apply the image, than if you were to reinstall the OS/apps.
 
It's not the time. It's losing what I have set up on this pc.

I looked up Acronis and saw something called "acronis migrate easy". Would that work? Also, it says that the free trial is fully operational. So I should be able to transfer everything without ever having to buy the thing, right?
 
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