Will this be OK?

W

Westkhan

New Member
In my last build I elected to keep my already existing WD 74Gb Raptor and use is as the OS running main disc.

At time I thought I could run all other applications from another disk and 74Gb was enough for the critical ones.

I see now it was a BIG mistake, as about 80% of the disk capacity is been already used and soon it will start to hamper down the whole system.

I wouldn't like to go through the whole mess of building up my system again.

Is it possible to just remove the hard drive, mirror it in another machine and then use a full copy of the system with a new, larger capacity hard drive replacing the C: one?

Will the OS have trouble operating because it is now in a different physical drive?

(I am running Vista-64 Home premium Edition, SVC PACK 1.)

Thanks for any inputs

WK
 
Westkhan said:
Is it possible to just remove the hard drive, mirror it in another machine and then use a full copy of the system with a new, larger capacity hard drive replacing the C: one?
Click to expand...

Yes. You can image the drive to another one and even increase the partition's size. Try this.


Will the OS have trouble operating because it is now in a different physical drive?
Click to expand...

No, it should not.
 
you might have to reactivate....

an alternative solution might be to install a seperate hard drive in your machine and move all of your data to the new drive... so all of your MP3's pictures, movies... etc etc

then keep the smaller drive for windows and programs and have the other drive as data... i dont know how much data you ahve but if thats whats fillin up the drive i would try that.
 
Yes you can create an image of the existing system, change out the drive to a larger one and restore the image. Any good imaging program will resize the image to fit on the newer larger drive and NO you will not have to reactive. Activation is never an issue when image a drive or restoring the image.
 
Word of advice, if you move the HDD to another machine to create and move the image to a larger HDD, do not boot from the new HDD until you put it in whatever system it's going to be staying in. Say your going to use the HDD in computer A, but you image and boot the HDD in computer B, the OS will not work in computer A. This is all typically speaking, occasionally you won't run into this problem but it can happen when you move a HDD with an OS on it from one computer to another because your changing the hardware (specifically the mobo). It'll just sit there and continuously reboot.
 
Just to wrap this one up:

The drive I mentioned also started acting up with some S.M.A.R.T. messages, so things became a bit more pressing.

I did mirror it (into a 150GB VelociRaptor), in another machine, using Norton Ghost.

No problems found (at least until now, 2 days after the procedure).

Thank you all for your invaluable help.

WK
 
Actaully any drive you buy theses days with come with cloning software.

1. install the new drive in your system
2. boot from the included software disc
3. clone the drive
4. remove the old drive
5. reboot.

If all goes well your up and running in no time.
 
IF you smart enough to by an OEM drive from an on-line retailer you should be smart enough to use a third party drive copy like Acronis True Image or one of the many free cloning programs.
 
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