Moving Windows

Snakedoctor · 20 Feb 2008 at 09:59

I am going to be getting a larger drive for my main OS as my old IDE drive is filling up. I am going to pop a 500gb sata drive in. The thing is, my OS has been installed for 9 months and is working really well, with lots of games etc installed. Is there some software which will take the contents of my IDE drive and put it on my new SATA drive so I can simply boot back up without reinstalling?

I have heard Acronis can do this, is this so, can you simply take the program and transfer my entire hard drive and it to boot ok?

Cheers

prescott28 · 20 Feb 2008 at 10:21

Can't you leave the old drive as a boot drive and use the new one for data? If you move programs and so forth off the old drive you will have plenty of room for windows and for programs and data on the new drive.

dagwoood · 20 Feb 2008 at 10:49

Turophobic said:
I have heard Acronis can do this, is this so, can you simply take the program and transfer my entire hard drive and it to boot ok?

Yes, you can do this with Acronis; there's an option to clone a drive which is for what you want to do.

Depending on the make of your hard drive, some hard drive manufacturers offer this type of software for free. It may be worth you looking into, save you some money.

Snakedoctor · 20 Feb 2008 at 10:53

dagwoood said:
Yes, you can do this with Acronis; there's an option to clone a drive which is for what you want to do.

Depending on the make of your hard drive, some hard drive manufacturers offer this type of software for free. It may be worth you looking into, save you some money.

Cheers, I thought so. I doubt if it will, its an OEM, no software included.

I want the Main 500gb sata as my OS drive due to SATA's decreased access times so it would be better to move the stuff and then format my IDE for storage.

Vimes · 20 Feb 2008 at 11:25

Cheers, I thought so. I doubt if it will, its an OEM, no software included.

That might not matter as, for example, Maxtor have a version of their maxblast type software (103mb in size) which, IIRC, is a version of Acronis available for download which can clone your old drive to a new one. It doesn't matter if the drive was bought oem or not. I assume, in the example I've used, it would only work if one of your drives was a Maxtor.
But other manufacturers could offer the same, as noted already for you.

I just did exactly the same thing but I already have Paragons Partition Manager and it would do a partition at a time rather than clone a whole disc, as I wanted to clone the OS on the primary partition and not disturb the logical partition of the destination drive and it worked well.

dagwoood · 20 Feb 2008 at 16:39

Vimes said:
That might not matter as, for example, Maxtor have a version of their maxblast type software (103mb in size) which, IIRC, is a version of Acronis available for download which can clone your old drive to a new one. It doesn't matter if the drive was bought oem or not. I assume, in the example I've used, it would only work if one of your drives was a Maxtor.
But other manufacturers could offer the same, as noted already for you.

Seagate also offer a version of Acronis with their DiscWizard software. You obviously need a Seagate drive to use it.

Snakedoctor · 20 Feb 2008 at 16:41

It's a Western Digital drive, been looking at there software downloads of the drive and could not see anything that would do this.