Replacing HD with OS on it

[LabanB]

Hi,

Its beginning to look as though my C drive disk is on its way out. Can anyone give me a simple explanation as to how I replace that disk (20gb) with the new one (80gb)? I may be able to borrow a copy of Norton Ghost to back up a copy of everything on the disk, but how do I get that info back onto the new disk whn the OS won't be installed as such?

Bill

[fritzi93]

Every hard-drive manufacturer I can think of has free utilities available for download. Normally they're proprietary and only work with their own brand, although WD and Maxtor have remarkably similar utilities.

Buy a new HD, put it in your computer as slave, open the utility and copy the HD over, being certain you specify that it be bootable. Move the freshly copied HD to the master position. Done. I do that from time to time.

It's a little more interesting if you're copying a HD with a restore partition. You'll have to turn off system restore to do one of those, along with setting up two partitions of the appropriate size, with the correct file system, blah blah. Copy each partition over. Not really difficult.

Good luck.

[EDIT] If you plan on doing a fresh install of the OS on the new drive, just put the old one in as slave and copy files over.

[greymalkin]

with ghost you will connect both drives into the computer then do a drive image copy from driveA (20gb) to driveB (80gb). Then pull out Drive A and make Drive B Drive A (more on this below). The next time you boot up it will be like nothing ever happened..you'll just have approx. 60 extra gb of free space.

Your hard drive will have 3 basic connections you want to consider. One is the power cable coming into it. If you have an ide drive this will have a white plastic block at the end of it. The other is the data cable, once again for ide this is a flat grey cable. Lastly you need to consider the jumpers on the back of the hard drive. You have to move these jumpers around to cover different pins to specify if you want the drive to be master/slave/cable select.

When you have both drives connected (if they are on the same data cable) you'll have to set one as master and other other as slave. Then after ghosting remove the old drive..set the new as master and close the case back up.

if you want more specific instructions you might want to take a picture of your computer with the case open and we can get real specific for you .

[LabanB]

Thanks a lot guys. As always since finding this site a few years ago, I'm amazed at the wealth of info available, and the speed with which it is supplied!!!!

Cheers again,

Bill

[redwudz]

Personally, I would just do a clean install of the OS into the new drive, then use the old drive in a slave configuration and copy only my data files over. That way you get rid of all your old 'baggage' from the previous OS install. This takes a little more work because of reinstalling your software, but you end up with a cleaner system.