blurblock

I had a 80GB HDD but i thinking for getting a bigger one i dont want to have 2 HDDs working on my system ... my data are too big n precious to be lose .. so is it possible to " clone " a HDD ? and .. how can i transfer data between 2 PC using a USB cable ?

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PC eye

If you plan to install a larger single primary drive you will first need to partition, format, and install the OS. Once you OSed a new drive you can create large iso type images from the files and folders on the drive. Cloning drives with XP can lead to problems at times. Norton Ghost, Acronis disk imaging, and several other softwares for cloning drives have been available for some time now.

An 80gb drive isn't that large for copying direct onto the new drive temporarily set as a slave to the new primary. If you are running or planning to run XP note that it "prefers" a new and fresh partition to install onto as part of the hardware detection and snapshot of the system as part of the product activation process. Firewire direct transfers would be more reliable then moving large files by way of usb. With two 250gb drives installed here the occasional 180gb of video files is simply copied direct from one to the other when making partition/OS changes.

The_Other_One

If you don't change anything else in the system, I know you can do a direct copy using software like Ghost(sorry, I don't know of any freeware right off...I'm looking too.) But with Ghost, I know you can make an image of your original drive then copy it over to the new drive with all the original files/programs intact.

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lovely?

is any of that illegal? cause that would technically be copying windows files, and thats against the law (as if you didnt know)

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The_Other_One

Ummm.... That raises a good point, but I'm quite sure it's legal. As you probably know, windows does not like major hardware changes. So, if you take a ghost image from one drive and load it to some other computer, it's not going to work.

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Primary- i7 920 | 6GB RAM | 9800GT | 160+160+500GB
Secondary- Athlon X2 4200 | 2GB RAM | 7600GT | 80+250GB
Netbook - Atom N280 | 2GB RAM | GMA945| 160GB

PC eye

What I found here running multiple ide drives and dual booting OSs is that XP favors a fresh partition to go on as well as fresh snapshot of the installed hardwares. The cloning and ghosting softwares only seem to work best when you are transferring to an identical hardware setup for some reason with XP especially. Acronis I thought had a shareware for trying out.

One question asked about cloning a primary hard drive under Windows saw this explaination at http://navasgrp.home.att.net/tech/clone_copy.htm Then there are hard drive duplicators like those seen at http://komar.cs.stthomas.edu/qm425/02s/Said2.htm

Besides looking for Ghost, Acronis, or another software read through the article seen for beginners at http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=418 The best article on this explains the idea of preserving the present environment of your main drive at any time in the PC Magazine artticle found at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2028,00.asp