Moving everything to new HDD

northun_munky · 7 Sep 2008 at 15:43

Hi,

When I put my rig together I intalled Vista and everything onto a 160gb hard drive I had spare. A few months in and lots of games and other stuff later I running really low on space. I'm thinking of getting a larger, faster Hard drive and was wondering if its possible to just copy everything over onto the new drive. I'd rather not just clean install everything if I can avoid it.

Edward01 · 7 Sep 2008 at 15:49

as in the whole OS as well? if so then no as far as i'm aware that isn't possible.

edit, yep i was wrong, did a google search and turns out you can. learn somthing new everyday

BarKeep · 7 Sep 2008 at 15:49

I use Acronis, Norton Ghost will do it as well. There are also some freeware disk cloning tools. Just have a Google.

northun_munky · 7 Sep 2008 at 15:52

I was thinking the os as well. If that can't be done then can I just put the os on the new drive and still use the programs and games from the old one?

~D~ · 7 Sep 2008 at 17:46

I've used Acronis to do the same thing as you're talking about.

Basically run the Backup option (I forget the exact name) and it makes a 'ghost' of your hard drive in a file (this file will naturally be huge, so make sure you have enough disk space and the drive in question is using an NTFS file system).

Then use the 'Restore' option (and point it to the new drive) and it will use the file you just created and restore it all onto the new drive. Then just disconnect the original C: drive and when you boot up again, the new one will be assigned C: and you're away to go :-)

If the new drive is a different size you will notice that it appears as the same size as the old C: drive, if this is the case then go to Disk Management and resize the partition to incorporate the unused space you will see displayed.

The new drive will work exactly like the old one.

AbsenceJam · 7 Sep 2008 at 18:00

With Acronis you don't need to backup and restore as it has a specific tool for cloning one drive to another and changing partition sizes along the way if you like.

BarKeep · 7 Sep 2008 at 18:01

You can do a direct disk to disk without making a disk image with both Acronis & Ghost.

Absence beat me to it.

~D~ · 7 Sep 2008 at 18:03

AbsenceJam said:
With Acronis you don't need to backup and restore as it has a specific tool for cloning one drive to another and changing partition sizes along the way if you like.

Well there you go, every day is a school day

northun_munky · 7 Sep 2008 at 20:31

Thanks for the advice all. Just need to find a nice big 'n' fast hard drive. The spinpoints still well rated?

Minato · 8 Sep 2008 at 17:16

samsung f1 500GB

runs fast, quiet, and it's dirt cheap

great buy for you right there

EDIT: for a bit more you can have the 1TB version

MoRT489 · 8 Sep 2008 at 17:19

think the F1 640GB is prefereable as it uses 2x 320GB platters so is faster, could be wrong tho, can anyone confirm?

northun_munky · 8 Sep 2008 at 19:28

Creed, just noticed in your sig you have a e2160. A friend of mine wants me to put together a system for £200 vista capable and OK to play games on. How you finding it handles games?

Namistai · 8 Sep 2008 at 19:56

creed said:
think the F1 640GB is prefereable as it uses 2x 320GB platters so is faster, could be wrong tho, can anyone confirm?

I can confirm that this is good advice

Either a 320gb, 640gb or 1tb use the 320gb platters and are therefore very fast. I have a 640gb in my home server and it flies along compared with what I'm used to!

fobose · 8 Sep 2008 at 22:32

I would go for the WD 640GB. I have seen it for £48 including delivery!!

thesnowdog1971 · 8 Sep 2008 at 22:58

I was a little wary of buying a Samsung drive not so long back but it was cheap so I bought it anyway, and was very impressed. Very fast, very quiet and it hasn't given me a single problem since I bought it. Now I won't even think about buying one unless it's a Samsung drive.

MoRT489 · 8 Sep 2008 at 23:20

northun_munky said:
Creed, just noticed in your sig you have a e2160. A friend of mine wants me to put together a system for £200 vista capable and OK to play games on. How you finding it handles games?

I've been fairly happy with it, dont think it's holding me back but the main thing i do is game and for the low budget it's great. i was hoping for 3.4GHz+ but am settling for 3.1/3.2GHz but u may get lucky. Still 3.1GHz for the price of 1.8 is insane!

hp7909 · 9 Sep 2008 at 04:56

northun_munky said:
a 160gb hard drive I had spare

Hope its SATA? Cloning an OS partition/drive from an IDE HD can get tricky

GunRunner · 9 Sep 2008 at 10:58

hp7909 said:
Hope its SATA? Cloning an OS partition/drive from an IDE HD can get tricky

With Ghost booting from a floppy it makes no difference at all. I have done it regularly many times.

Sunbed · 9 Sep 2008 at 11:19

As there are Acronis and Norton users here, quick question: Is it OK to backup to an external hard drive? I had problems with it a while back. The only solution I had was to backup to same disk, then move the image. However moving backups is not recommended apparently.

GunRunner · 9 Sep 2008 at 11:52

Sundance said:
As there are Acronis and Norton users here, quick question: Is it OK to backup to an external hard drive? I had problems with it a while back. The only solution I had was to backup to same disk, then move the image. However moving backups is not recommended apparently.

I am a Norton Ghost user and as far as I am concerned (I never do it as I have a spare internal HD), I can clone from an internal drive to an external drive. Put it this way as soon as you posted I switched on my Freecom external USB HD and rebooted my PC and using my Norton Ghost floppy, as soon as I enterrred the Ghost menu, it showed the Freecom HD. If it sees the drive it will clone to it. Not only that, but my C drive is 500 MB and the back up drive (the one I clone to) is only 250mb, but because I have only 200mb of data on the 500mb drive, it still clones it to the 250mb drive. I hope this helps!