I need a bigger C: drive

[sdsumike619]

Somehow I only have a 20GB C: (system drive) and now it's full.. Is there some easy 21st century way of transferring all the data on this small drive onto a bigger drive and keep everything working as if nothing changed except that now I have much more space for programs?

[stiltman]

ghost

[poisondeathray]

another option: Acronis True Image

[kato51]

Most new drives (WD, Seagate, Maxtor) comes with a transfer utility.

[sdsumike619]

thanks I am live chatting with Acronis right now...

[fritzi93]

Most new drives (WD, Seagate, Maxtor) comes with a transfer utility.

That's what I do. They're all remarkably similar, and available at the manufacturers' websites. The programs complain if the brand of the drive is different from the program, but will do the job nevertheless. Hook up the new drive as slave or in an external enclosure, doesn't matter. Boot up, open the program, select setup, then the drive, then make certain you specify it is to be the new boot device. Copy, power down, swap drives (don't forget proper jumper settings), bootup. Done.

Good luck. Oh, probably best to run a defrag, other checks, etc. beforehand.

[sdsumike619]

Well I actually have two bigger drives already installed in the computer that are slave drives with stuff on them. Perhaps I can use one of those as my new system drive. So you're saying that I can get a basic hard drive utility program and put it on a bootable CD and one of the options is to make a mirror of one drive onto another drive (even if it's the system drive where windows and programs are installed) ?

[fritzi93]

Well I actually have two bigger drives already installed in the computer that are slave drives with stuff on them. Perhaps I can use one of those as my new system drive. So you're saying that I can get a basic hard drive utility program and put it on a bootable CD and one of the options is to make a mirror of one drive onto another drive (even if it's the system drive where windows and programs are installed) ?

No, straight copy one to another. Install the program on the C drive and hook up the new drive in your computer. Do the drive cloning within Windows. It's not failed me in, oh, a dozen or so times. But you must choose the bootable copy option.

IIRC, the WD and Maxtor utilities (DataLifeGuard and MaxBlast) are actually minimal versions of Acronis. And SeaTools as well, if I'm not mistaken. I've used DLG and MB, they seem essentially identical apart from the name.

[redwudz]

Just to toss this in, Acronis isn't that expensive and besides transferring your old HDD data to your new HDD, it can also backup your system to disc or HDD if you have a major failure of your system in the future. That may be very handy if your system ever dies or you have a major malware attack.

[INFRATOM]

Some hard drives when you buy for example Western digital comes with a cd that has a utility that transfers your data so easily then it gives you a choice to keep it as a backup or remove it. In any case using Acronis , ghost .. etc when you do the change you may have to activate your windows again.

[DarrellS]

I would just move all the data off of the boot drive and keep it as C:\. I prefer a small boot drive myself.

My C:\ got a virus last week that killed IE and I had to reinstall Windows so I just erased a 40GB drive I had laying around and reinstalled windows and all my programs. Everything took up 13GB of space. I doubt I'll be able to get 20GB worth of programs on the drive. My old HP drive was only 14.9GB and it worked fine for years. I have two 500GB storage drives, a 750GB capture drive and an external drive enclosure for other drives I have and to play movies on my Philips 5990. I also bought a 4GB thumb drive today.

[SCDVD]

Just to toss this in, Acronis isn't that expensive and besides transferring your old HDD data to your new HDD, it can also backup your system to disc or HDD if you have a major failure of your system in the future. That may be very handy if your system ever dies or you have a major malware attack.

I have used Acronis on two different systems with no problems at all. It's a good utility.

[sdsumike619]

I have some mixed feelings about Acronis... I opted to try that product with their "fully functional trial" Whatever you do, don't believe it. It's NOT fully functional. The first time I ran it, I used the clone disk feature and when it came time to restore to the new disk, I find out that it didn't clone anything at all. Then their live chat support told me to use the boot disk method instead. I did that and got to the last step only to press "proceed" and find out I can't do it because it's a trial. I told them this was not fair to advertise fully functional for 15 days and then have that very obvious limitation. So the customer service person sent me a fully functional boot disk utility. Finally, it worked and I'm using the bigger HD now.

[guns1inger]

We use Acronis for keeping base laptop and desktop images, and can vouch for it's accuracy, speed (about 5 times faster than Ghost when backing and restoring from the same network share), and their support is excellent. When we got a new model desktop not supported by current version of Acronis (at that time), they post a new build over night for three nights running until the problem was resolved. Symantec would never be so helpful. I now use Acronis at home as well, backing up the desktop and two laptops to an external USB drive. Twice now it has saved me when HDDs have died and had me up and running again withing an hour of installing new drives.

[ahhaa]

There is another free alternative:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/clonezilla