Safest Transfer

g4m3rof1337

g4m3rof1337

Active Member
I have a a full hard drive. And I want to upgrade it to a bigger hard drive.

I can not find my windows installation disks. I can probably find them if needed though.

But how would I transfer everything on one hard drive to another, including the operating system if possible.

Should I backup the hard drive just in case? But I want total assurance that everything is transferred over.

Cause I might format the hard drive. And just use the bigger hard drive.



Thanks
 
There are several programs for cloning drives like Norton Ghost and Acronis. Being that the new drive will be larger and not identical the idea of creating an image to preserve files and seeing a clean install of Windows on the new drive would be the prederred there. This is due to the hardware profiling seen in Windows. Before wiping the current drive you would have to verify all files are intact on the new drive first.

Burning data dvds for more permanent storage would work better. If either drive gets infected by a virus later or you reformat the first you can always copy them back off of removable media. But even there you want to verify good burns to disk before any planned reformat.
 
So I would boot up with two hard drives connected.

I have Acronis true image.

So would I need my windows installation stuff?



Thanks
 
You would need Windows running to use Acronis I can imagine. For preping the new drive you can temporarily slave it in order for the initial partitioning and formatting or simply let the Windows installer format it. A right click on the drive in the Disk Management after partitioning will allow you to use that menu for a quick or full format.

Since you are mainly preserving files and not cloning installations on identical drives like seen at a large company you will have the option of creating an image of the actual files and folders you plan to transfer. One trick learned early with backing up data was to always have a main folder with several catagorized sub folders on the drive for things like docs, photo, driver updates, utilities, and other things until they accumilate enough for a good burn to removable media. The question of "what if?" a drive fails before installing a newer and even larger/faster model takes place comes to mind there. Frequent backups to removable means being prepared for..?
 
I have the DS3.
And I have 6 all together separate SATA ports.
3 ports with 2 each.
2 ports are yellow. And the other is purple.

Where does the second HDD get plugged into.


Thanks
 
When you are adding onliy the second sata drive you can choose between the second port on the primary or run as a secondary sata master. Here I simply use the second sata as the slave and not planning it as part of an array. That's one thing to note on this. Make sure the bios is not set for any array for the temp use there. That would cause problems with both being seen as one logical drive.

Once everything is preserved as an image you move the new drive to the primary master position for being the new host there. Are you still going to run the old drive as a second? You would simply reverse positions. But make sure you unplug it when going to install Windows on the new primary master since you plan to reformat the old drive.
 
Just remember to double check the file integrity as much as possible before wiping everything off of the old drive first. If you had a few bad transfers you will still have the originals left for a copy and paste there.
 
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