Replacing old HDD with new.

Digital X

Digital X

Digital X

Soldato
Joined
25 May 2013
Posts
10,137
Location
Kent.
I have an old PC for older titles but alas it is only 40GB, so I bought a 320GB one today.

I'm not fussed about losing a few games but how do I transfer the current OS (Win XP) and move it over to the new drive?

I've only added HDD's into PC never replaced one.

I have a few USB drives if that will help, or will I need to use my current PC's HDD cables for transfer etc?

It's a prebuilt if that affects anything, properiety stuff etc.
 

spolsh

spolsh

spolsh

Associate
Joined
20 Jul 2015
Posts
386
get some cloning software (something like macrium reflect or acronis), install then just clone the old drive to the new. When done, you should just be able to disconnect old disk and use the new one.
 

Big.Wayne

Big.Wayne

Big.Wayne

Soldato
Joined
11 Sep 2003
Posts
14,716
Location
London
It is a fairly straight forward process to clone/swap out an old drive for new, assuming the new drive is happy in your old system that it.

You will need both drives installed/connected to your system and then just open the backup software (I use Acronis but there are many others) and run the clone option. The software presents a few almost idiot proof screens where you select the source drive and then the target drive. The software is quite slick so if it thinks any adjustments need to be made it will probably offer up some suggestions.

If you haven't got spare cables to connect the 2nd drive you may be able to use the cables attached to a CD/DVD drive temporarily as you won't need the optical drive attached to clone one hard disk to another (an old optical drive may be IDE/Molex so if your new hard drive is SATA then scrap this last suggestion!) :D
 

demonix

demonix

demonix

Associate
Joined
26 Jul 2008
Posts
2,064
Location
Cowley, Middx
If any of the hard drives are from western digital or seagate which are just versions of acronis true image that are configured to only work with their drives installed in a specific computer.

One thing it will do is resize the primary partition to either fit on the new drive if it is smaller or expand it if there is more space available, and on an older system cloning a drive that has the OS installed should not cause any issues when it's switching to the outside the OS cloning software after the reboot has been done.

If you don't want to do any removing until the clone has been done and the drives have to be swapped, you can get an enclosure for the drive that the OS is going to be cloned to (there should be some that support both SATA and IDE drives) and then once the operation has been completed all you have to do is swap out the drives and start the computer back up and everything should continue as if nothing had happened.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom