How to replace a hard drive

You're going to need special software that's going to copy and paste your partition from your old drive to your new one if you want your OS to be copied too. If it's just files you want to transfer, it can be done in your OS. Just connect both drives and copy the files from one drive to the other the same way you would between folders.
 
It all depends, do you want to copy your OS across to the new HDD, so that you can use it on the new HDD, or do you want to copy My Documents and ordinary non os data across?

If you want to clone your OS across, you would go to the HDD's manufacturer's website and download their utility for that, or if you have something like Acronis True Image Home 11...
 
i was just wondering this too


i have a raptor 74gb as my OS drive and i want to replace it with a 500gb barracuda 7200.11


i dont want to reinstall everything i just want to copy from one to the other then swap them over

do i need software for this or can ot be done manually in windows xp ?
 
Jbuk - go to the Seagate website and goto the download center. Discwizard is what you need.
 
Actually, can I just ask something similar regarding this subject?

I've just got a new HDD, gonna install the OS onto it, blah de blah, but will I then be able to have both drives active (both with an OS on them), and be able to transfer data from the old HDD to the new one? Once I've got everything I need from the old one, I'm going to format it and use as a backup drive.

Do I need to do anything regarding jumper setting and whatnot? Or can that be done in BIOS? If so, how?
 
Tombo said:
That would work and the jumpers shouldn't need to be touched.
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Not necessarily. You need to be careful installing an OS when there are multiple HDDs in the system, Windows has a nasty habit of installing to the drive you want but actually putting the boot files on a different drive. If that happens you end up with partitions with the wrong drive letters and a system that won't boot if you pull one of the drives.

You're always better off installing an OS with only one drive installed in the PC which, if you have IDE drives, means setting the jumpers appropriately.
 
I see. So taking out the current HDD, and then installing the new one, and installing the OS to that one should be fine then? And then re-connecting the old one at a later stage to get what I want off it?
 
But then the naming of the drives would be all wrong, I've never had problems when installing multiple OS's either just put xp on C:\ and then Vista on E:\.
 
Tombo said:
But then the naming of the drives would be all wrong
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No it wouldn't. TehBluebear wants the OS on the new drive and his existing drive will get formatted so by only having the new drive attached it becomes C: with the OS on it, as is the convention, and his existing drive takes whatever is the next free drive letter when he puts it back in.
 
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