Transfering my OS hard drive onto a bigger hard drive

[dqtus]

Hey, OK I wanna transfer my C drive over to a new and bigger hard drive. I'm running windows XP and it is installed on my C drive. I remember I tried this before and everything copied fine except for the user profile sections so I ended up formatting everything and starting with a fresh install. Some files were locked or something. Anyways I heard there were programs that will be able to transfer the files properly so I was wondering what they are if anyone knows. Thanks!

[Craig Tucker]

Use something like norton ghost that will create an image of the hard drive. You can then restore that image to your new larger hard drive. How big is your C drive now, you dont need that much space for OS and programs and even with a larger drive you should really partition off a small portion for your OS. If you just want more space for storage then get a large secondary drive and install it alongside your current C: drive.

[mickle]

I've used Powerquest Drive Image to do exactly this a couple of time, works like a charm.

[dqtus]

Well right now my Hard drives are configured a little funny. I have a 70gb C drive and another secondary drive that is 120GB partitioned into a D and E with 90GB and 30 GB respectively. The thing is I need more space! So I could install the new 250GB drive using SATA but I dont like my current C drive since it makes too much noise when loading. So once I transfer the data should I just partition the C drive? Maybe leave like 25 GB for the OS and then use the rest as another storage. Would it make the OS run any slower if I didn't partition it?