Dougloid From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Posted (6 years 5 months 1 week 3 days 12 hours ago) and read 840 times:
Folks, I picked up a 160 gb hard drive for Thurgood, my Dell desktop, this week. It's my intention to migrate all the files including the OS and replace the 40gb hard drive that sits there presently and use the 160 gb Seagate as my primary drive.
I've gotten some information on this.First was a series of articles by Fred Langa in Information Week which advise the use of Windows Disk Imaging. I also downloaded a 15 day free trial edition of Acronis True Image 10.0.
Anyone have any ideas on the least painful way to get the drives swapped out?
Pope From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 1, posted (6 years 5 months 1 week 3 days 11 hours ago) and read 833 times:
A couple of months ago I upgrade my 60 GB harddrive on my laptop to 100 GB. I purchased a kit a Best Buy that had the laptop and some software that allowed me to mirror the drive. It worked perfectly and in less than 30 minutes the new drive was installed and ready to go.
I'll see if I can find the name of the software later tonight when I head home.
Go3Team From United States of America, joined Mar 2004, 3266 posts, RR: 22 Reply 3, posted (6 years 5 months 1 week 3 days 11 hours ago) and read 821 times:
Depending on the laptop, and how much crap you have on it that you want to save, you could just install the hard drive into the laptop, and use the rescue disk that should have come with the laptop to reinstall the OS onto the new disk.
Dougloid From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 5, posted (6 years 5 months 1 week 3 days 10 hours ago) and read 796 times:
Quoting Pope (Reply 1): A couple of months ago I upgrade my 60 GB harddrive on my laptop to 100 GB. I purchased a kit a Best Buy that had the laptop and some software that allowed me to mirror the drive. It worked perfectly and in less than 30 minutes the new drive was installed and ready to go.
I'll see if I can find the name of the software later tonight when I head home.
Aloges From Germany, joined Jan 2006, 8357 posts, RR: 47 Reply 6, posted (6 years 5 months 1 week 3 days 9 hours ago) and read 790 times:
I've only ever done that on the cheap, which means plugging the new drive into the PC as a slave and then copying everything from the master manually. I select everything on the old HDD, tell Windose to copy it to the new one and once the "can't copy file blahblahblah" windows pop up, I check where it stopped and make it continue after that.
I do have Acronis TrueImage though, I've used it to backup my C partition on the D partition. I don't have truly vital info on my machine, so that's fine for me, and I've never needed any backups I made anyway. So alas, I can't tell you how easily Acronis images are restored.
[Edited 2006-12-14 20:56:43]
Walk together, talk together all ye peoples of the earth. Then, and only then, shall ye have peace.
Dougloid From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 7, posted (6 years 5 months 1 week 1 day ago) and read 752 times:
Quoting Aloges (Reply 6): I do have Acronis TrueImage though, I've used it to backup my C partition on the D partition. I don't have truly vital info on my machine, so that's fine for me, and I've never needed any backups I made anyway. So alas, I can't tell you how easily Acronis images are restored.
I downloaded a copy of Acronis Trueimage 10.0 on a 2 week tree trial after doing a little research. The instructions were dead simple and I've just completed a seamless trouble free hard drive replacement/upgrade with nary a snag.
It worked so well I'll probably go and buy a copy of it. Which is pretty likely what the folks at Acronis wanted.
No matter, I don't think I could have bought the hard drive for much less than I did.
Rolfen From Germany, joined Jan 2006, 1764 posts, RR: 2 Reply 8, posted (6 years 5 months 1 week 12 hours ago) and read 713 times:
Just my 5 stamps (1 cent each), if you're a geek like me, you can use:
Ranish Partition manager
It's a freely downloadable bootable floppy which will copy your partitions for you.
When you launch it you get a dos-like screen full of cool numbers on a blue background that will make you look real smart it's not such a big deal, really, but some people dont want to deal with it.
So what you'll do is copy the 40 gigs partition to the new disk and mark it as bootable partition, and install a regular boot sector, all this from ranish p.m. (rpm).
Now you'll be left with a problem: you have a 40 gig partition and 120 free gigs. What to do? You cant just resize the partition with rpm, it will corrupt it.
Either you just create another partition on the 120 free gigs, and you'll have two logical drives on your pc ( c: and d: ) or you use a special tool for resizing partitions... maybe your acronis can do that but you'll have to pay... I usually use partition magic, but it's not free either, and you need the newest version or else it might corrupt your data.
Dougloid From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 9, posted (6 years 5 months 1 week 9 hours ago) and read 687 times:
Well, it worked like a champ and I don't seem to have lost any settings or data. Acronis True Image is a good product, and not only that, it has very good documentation.
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From , joined Dec 1969, posts, 
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From Germany, joined Jan 2006, 8357 posts, 
it's not such a big deal, really, but some people dont want to deal with it.
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