Upgrading Hard Drive

[spacelord]

I have not done this since the Win 95/98 days, but I used to be able to copy the entire C: drive to another drive with a boot disk and a fancy xcopy command. How about now with XP?

All my applications and games are on the C: partition with XP. My data is on D:
I would like to move the C: to the new drive.. and the D: onto the 2nd partition of the new drive.
To the computer it should be the same when all said and done.. (C: and D.. just larger partitions.

They are both SATA drives if that makes any difference.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[Nothinman]

Technically, probably, but it's risky. It's much safer to use an imaging tool like Ghost or DriveImage, I thought most drives came with one of those now.

 

[spacelord]

Its an OEM drive so no software. But I have plenty of disks laying around from Maxtor and Western Digital laying around so I'll check into that... I assume the brand shouldn't matter. This new drive is a Seagate.

It shouldn't be too risky, since I won't format the original drive until I verify that everything is working OK.

 

[DJediMaster]

Yeah you can use disk imaging tools like norton ghost or the one from acronis. I'm pretty sure there are free utils that do this out there but I don't have any direct experience with them. You can also resize the partitions however you like.

If you're still using the old drives on a computer on the same network you will want to generate a new SID and update the network config for the new box.

 

[spacelord]

This old/original drive will be formated and used for data after I get the new drive operating successfully.

 

[PowerEngineer]

I think you should be able to do what you describe with the Seagate disk installation tools. Looks like you can download it here

Good luck!

 

[Pirotech]

hmm, for cloning the old drive to the new one, i used migrate easy from acronis, all you need is just to install the prog, plug the new drive as a slave, then clone the old one to the new one, and make new one as master, that's all. i think it's very easy.
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/

also it has 15 day trial full working copy.

 

[JustStarting]

Acronis 9.0.... the best $29 I've spent on computing stuff EVER. Just install and click on "clone" drive. It takes about 5 minutes to do a 320gb SATA hdd. Reboot, test both drives alone (with the other unplugged) and both will be bootable.

Magic...... but way better than Partition Magic. If you use PM 8.0 and remove the drive it was installed on, you are toast. Acronis clones the MBR, activation key and all.

 

[Nothinman]

If you use PM 8.0 and remove the drive it was installed on, you are toast. Acronis clones the MBR, activation key and all. Acronis clones the MBR, activation key and all.

The MBR will be the same on virtually all Windows machines, the only time it would be different is if you installed a 3rd party boot manager. And the activation key (assuming you mean for Windows) is stored in the filesystem with Windows so it'll be cloned no matter what you use.