Need a bigger system drive; how to transfer EVERYTHING?

[sdsumike619]

I need to buy a bigger hard drive for my operating system and program files. But I don't want to have to reinstall windows and all the programs, settings, etc on this new drive. Is there some way I can just either make an image, or somehow transfer everything as it is on the small drive to the large drive to essentially continue where I left off?

[yoda313]

norton ghost should do it. Or acronis? I think I've seen that mentioned around here.

[redwudz]

Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image are two commercial programs that can do that. They can also be used for regular backup. There are some freeware ones available also. And many hard drive manufactures include a disc with their drives for cloning or backup. You might check with them first.

Generally I try not to put that much on my boot drive, so I've never had a need to clone it unless the drive is failing. I use my secondary drives for large video and data files.

[jagabo]

Most boxed retail drives come with drive copying (etc) software. I recently bought a Seagate drive and it included software from Acronis.

[dunamis]

The very best solution to this situation is to use BounceBack Pro. You can find it at: http://www.cmsproducts.com/product_bounceback_professional.htm.

[fritzi93]

Most boxed retail drives come with drive copying (etc) software. I recently bought a Seagate drive and it included software from Acronis.

I should stipulate the following may be out of date, as I haven't checked on latest versions:

I've used the free utilities from WD, Maxtor, Seagate, they're all remarkably similar, basically the difference is the name. Not having used Acronis, I'll take the word of others that it's just a basic version of Acronis. Anyway, the free program from the manufacturer (whichever one) can do it just fine. Try to copy to a drive from a different manufacturer and the program will complain. It will do the job nevertheless.

Make certain you tick the box specifying the copied drive is to be bootable. Then you'll get a bit-for-bit copy. I do it a couple times a year from a master backup drive with a clean XP install and everything set up as I prefer. Data I backup normally.

Good luck. :wink:

[TBoneit]

I believe the Acronis from Seagate is the same as the paid for version except it won't work without a Seagate drive in the system.

[AlanHK]

XXclone is free and does the job reliably.

[Bjs]

Just get the hard drives manufacturer's tools to do the job of copying from one drive to the other, after the new drive has been partitioned and formatted, cost's nothing.

If you want to "image" a drive, this is where those other mentioned tools come in, personally it's drive image from paragon.

[blinky88]

This is the method I use to backup everything on my main drive. I bought 2x20g identical Seagate HDD in removable racks, I find 20g is more than enough for the OS and everyday work. I clone one drive and keep it in my cabinet. Each month I re-clone the clone, it is always up to date. I have 2 other HDD in my tower 1x160g and 1x120g. Anything to do with video dvd's etc. goes onto the larger drives .... all drives are ATA100.

At one time a virus found it's way onto drive C, I simply replaced it with the clone and then cloned the effected drive to what was previously the clone. I use Norton's Ghost and have never had a problem.

20g drives are so cheap these days (<$20) it is an easy way to go.

[lenti_75]

This is the method I use to backup everything on my main drive. I bought 2x20g identical Seagate HDD in removable racks, I find 20g is more than enough for the OS and everyday work.

Why don't you use raid 1?

Any software form manufacturer site is good enough.
Acronis is better than ghost. a lot of people used to complain about ghost in the past when cloning the sistem drive.

[blinky88]

lenti_75,

You may well be right. I have been using that system for 4\5 years and never have any problems. About Ghost, never had any problems with that either. The OS is 4\5 years old and I have never had an occasion where I have had to load a new system.

Your suggestion about using RAID 1 not quite so bright, had I been using RAID 1, the virus I referred to would have been on both drives.

I guess if you are using that method, I suggest you have a L O N G hard look at it as it will get you into trouble at some stage.

[Seeker47]

Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image are two commercial programs that can do that.

Acronis TI has a System Migration tool. So far, I've used it once, moving to a 50 % larger hard drive. There are adjustments you can make, but I think the basic algorithm just made all the partitions 50 % larger, distributing the free space to each, though otherwise as they had been, and everything (multiple OSes) still worked. Had I left it at that, probably everything would have been fine, but I just had to make some changes and "improvements", which bought me at least an extra week's worth of work. It all came out in the wash, but you can easily break the bootability of a migrated OS boot partition (Windows, in particular), if you're not careful.

Generally I try not to put that much on my boot drive.

Yeah, but that strategy definitely has its limits. I routinely install larger Win apps (like the Open Office suite) to their own Apps partition, but in so many cases, Windows insists on dumping a whole lotta files onto the boot partition, anyway. And I don't think this is avoidable. Just one of the many reasons Win is a pain in the rear.

[Poppa_Meth]

The last version of Seagate's Acronis TI I used was pretty much the same as regular TI, it just had to have a Seagate or Maxtor drive in the system and you can only use it in Windows. There is no way to make a boot disk with it like you can do with the full version.

[TBoneit]

This is the method I use to backup everything on my main drive. I bought 2x20g identical Seagate HDD in removable racks, I find 20g is more than enough for the OS and everyday work.

Why don't you use raid 1?

Any software form manufacturer site is good enough.
Acronis is better than ghost. a lot of people used to complain about ghost in the past when cloning the sistem drive.

Mirroring is only good for protection against hardware failures. It won't protect you against a "Opps I didn't mean to delete that" or virus damage. Mirroring is good if you can not afford to have the computer go down. One such application would be a security recording system. However it still needs to be used along with backups.

blinky88's method couls use a little tweaking too. I'd be using two or more external drives for backup. and rotating them.

[Seeker47]

[blinky88's method couls use a little tweaking too. I'd be using two or more external drives for backup. and rotating them.

That is my preferred method, exactly. I like to have a reasonably up-to-date clone drive I could swap in, should that become necessary.

But the OP was looking to migrate to a larger HDD. And that meant adjusting the rotation for larger drives. Hard drives are cheap enough these days (as long as you don't need those 500, 750, or 1TB monsters, which I wouldn't want to mess with, anyway), but I still hope I don't need to upgrade again anytime soon.

[cd090580]

DriveImage XML can also do that and it's free. Or any manufacturers hard drive installation tools have the option to copy the old to the new drive