Updating the C drive

[Bob The Builder]

I have a 30gb hdd as my C drive. It has the o/s, programs, etc., and am truly out of space! I want to replace it with a 500gb**(WD/Seagate). I already have a second hard drive of 120gb for more storage as F drive. Can I just copy/move everything from the C drive (30gb with o/s, programs on it), to the F drive (120gb for more storage), and then add the 500gb (WD/Seagate) for more storage. Is the newer hard drive better for running the o/s and programs (with having more cache and more modern technology)? Then I would rather run the o/s and programs from the newest hard drive (500gb WD/Seagate). So how do you transfer the data from the smaller drive to the larger drive? Is there programs to do this? Can you do a clean/fresh install of XP on the new 500gb, but first remove the original C drive? What about all the other programs and drivers and stuff? Do I make a list of the ones I want to re-install and then add them one by one?

By the way, I am running XP home, on a PIII 800Mhz, 133 ram and the hard drives are e-ide. Thanks for any info>

**I have a WD 500gb my book external hard drive, can I just take the drive out of the case and use that as the 500gb hard drive in the above scenario?

 

[The_Other_One]

While it is possible to move stuff from one drive to another, you do need special software. Sometimes it's provided by drive manufacturers, or you may have to buy some software like Norton Ghost. I think there's some free software, eh Clonezilla, and some other program that copies the information to a local FTP server.

As for performance, things would probably load more quickly. Yeah, faster access times, less latency, less crap on the drive

As for your specs...eh, that machine's quite old... I know some older machines had some hard drive size limitations, but I think they were mostly during the pre-Pentium era.

And your external drive; depending on how old it is, it may be SATA. If that's the case, you'd need to purchase an SATA controller. Otherwise, it should work no problem in your computer.

 

[lawson_jl]

Any retail drive will come with cloning software which is quit good as a matter of fact. Your computer will recognize a 500 gig drive fine, but as the above commenter said make sure you get a PATA drive. As far as taking the drive out of the the My Book you probley could but you'd destroy the My Book in the process and there may be some kind of special connector on the drive.