Want to replace main hard drive.

swanseamale47

swanseamale47

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wayne clarke
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I want to replace a PC main hard drive (C drive) it's getting on a bit a now (few years old) and I need a bigger drive anyway, so this leaves me with 2 questions.
1. any recomendations for a decent make, I was thinking western digital maybe?

2 Whats the easiest way to move over ALL the stuff on my existing drive, I really don't fancy trying to reinstall all the stuff I have on there (just the photoshop plugins alone would take a while lol) plus I don't know if I can find all the disks for some of the odd and ends.

Windows xp pro.
Any advice welcome. Thanks Wayne
 
Would a second hard drive work? That way you could keep all your data on that one and your programs on your existing hard drive.
 
Wayne what size hard drive are you looking at, i got one of THESE a couple of months ago, and it's running fine, i think it cost me nearer £60 when i bought it, so this seems like a good price now, as regards moving everything over, a friend of mine did it for me when he installed the drive, he used some software that clones everything then you just copy it straight on to the new drive, i think the software was called "Acronis true image" but not 100% sure on that but will find out :)
 
you can clone the drive as above, you "may" need access to a separate PC to do this. otherwise you cant just copy everything, you wont copy the core system files so nothing will work.
 
neil_g said:
you can clone the drive as above, you "may" need access to a separate PC to do this. otherwise you cant just copy everything, you wont copy the core system files so nothing will work.
Click to expand...

Cloning can be done quite easily using the machine the drive is installed on and a new drive either installed or via USB enclosure.

Download and burn BartPE to CD/DVD and it will provide a bootable Windows environment with all the tools you need for hard drive cloning, system recovery etc.

Clone the drive then pop the new drive in as master. Job done.

Every Windows user should keep a copy of BartPE handy for those times when Windows dies.
 
Another vote here for running a second drive (unless all the space is taken up by programs). It is much easier if you do need to reinstall the OS etc if your data is on a separate drive.
 
Either run a 2nd drive purely for data / photos etc and keep your programmes etc on the old harddrive.

OR

Norton Ghost. Use NG to create a ghost image stored on an external drive, this creates a COMPLETE working backup of your drive as is... Install new drive, run Norton Ghost again to restore orginal image.. simples!!

Then use NG to create regular differential backups...

Carl
 
Symantec backup exec system recovery (similar to Norton ghost), its about £30 for the desktop edition.

It allows you to take a full system image and then restore it to new hardware. I've used it to image an IBM server and then restored it to a dell laptop to show a customer what it can do.
 
You can use programs like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image to copy the whole drive to a new one.
If any of it seems daunting or you prefer to not spend out on such programs then shout. I am in S. Wales and have such programs and quite happy to clone your drive to a new one for you.
As for makes of drives, using storage extensively in my line of work I would say Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi are all reasonably reliable despite Seagate having a bit of a "oops" recently with their larger drives (750GB and 1TB) - all fixed now.
 
Many thanks for all the replies. I should have explained I already have a second internal drive, the original drive in the PC is quite small (30 GB) and with all the programs and lightrooms bloated file structure running into GB's of space alone, it's getting a little low on space now.
Norton or Acronis sound promising, I'm reasonably computer literate, is the process difficult? I'm not bothered by the actual drive swop (I know how that works) but I'm a little cautious about the rest of it if I'm honest.
Thanks everybody. Wayne
 
Don't forget xp pro has its own proprietary back up program.

Just back up to disk and when the blue screens for loading windows start I think the secon option is F2 for back up
 
swanseamale47 said:
I'm reasonably computer literate, is the process difficult? I'm not bothered by the actual drive swop (I know how that works) but I'm a little cautious about the rest of it if I'm honest.
Thanks everybody. Wayne
Click to expand...

Acronis is simply a point/click while running the program within windows. I have not used Ghost since moving to Acronis several versions ago but that is probably not much more difficult. Acronis makes an image of my 30GB C: drive (only 18GB in use) in around 7 mins.
If you clone to another drive it would be as simple as install the drive; use Acronis to clone the OS drive to the new drive; remove OS drive; ensure PC boots from new drive.
 
Do all these copy/clone/backup software programs also transfer the OS?
If not you are going to have to install the OS onto the new hard drive.
 
I have norton on principle from all sorts of random support problems.
acronis would be my vote.

to be honest, a reinstall though is the way forward.
windows gets so bogged down with what can only be described as CRAP that a reinstall sometimes is ideally what you need.
I think you'll find that speed and stability improve

then you can run your image again from that point and use it in the future
however, windows 7 is here (and it's quite good). would it be worth using a 64bit version of W7 on your new drive?
 
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