Upgrading a hard drive

[Rick]

I have a a second computer with Vista installed, however it's on an 80 gig
hard drive which is pretty full, AIUI everything can be transferred onto a
larger drive using a 'clone' programme such as Norton Ghost, however this
seems a bit pricey at £40.00 for something that I will probably use maybe
only once or twice, can someone please advise me the best way of going about
this task and maybe provide a few pointers on any difficulties that I may
encounter and on how best to avoid them, TIA.

 

[Rick]

Your hard drive's manufacturer should have an application you can use to
clone your old drive to the new.

The drive with Vista on is years old and the available larger capacity drive
is of a different manufacture, so how would I go about doing that?

 

[Nil]

The drive with Vista on is years old and the available larger
capacity drive is of a different manufacture, so how would I go
about doing that?

The utility from the new drive's manufacturer should work. They want to
make it as easy as possible for you to upgrade your computer with their
spiffy new drive.

 

[Ed Cryer]

I have a a second computer with Vista installed, however it's on an 80
gig hard drive which is pretty full, AIUI everything can be transferred
onto a larger drive using a 'clone' programme such as Norton Ghost,
however this seems a bit pricey at £40.00 for something that I will
probably use maybe only once or twice, can someone please advise me the
best way of going about this task and maybe provide a few pointers on
any difficulties that I may encounter and on how best to avoid them, TIA.

I've been with Paragon free backup for years, and done many HD transfers
with it.
But I notice on Cnet's download page that their popularity figures put
EASEUS Todo backup way in front of it.

http://tinyurl.com/2f493qu

Ed

 

[Rick]

I've been with Paragon free backup for years, and done many HD transfers
with it.
But I notice on Cnet's download page that their popularity figures put
EASEUS Todo backup way in front of it.

http://tinyurl.com/2f493qu

Thanks, the feedback looks good, I'll download it and give it a whirl
tomorrow.

 

[relic]

The drive with Vista on is years old and the available larger capacity
drive is of a different manufacture, so how would I go about doing that?

Only one of the drives need to be from the vendor that you get the cloning
software from.

A second choice is True Image from Acronis. Their "Trial" version is fully
functional for 17 days.

 

[Zaidy036]

Only one of the drives need to be from the vendor that you get the cloning
software from.

A second choice is True Image from Acronis. Their "Trial" version is fully
functional for 17 days.

And provides a very good backup option to use frequently

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Only one of the drives need to be from the vendor that you get the cloning
software from.

A second choice is True Image from Acronis. Their "Trial" version is fully
functional for 17 days.

A third choice is Macrium Reflect, which has a free version. No time
limit, but limited functionality (no incremental backups).

 

[RL Anderson]

Thanks, the feedback looks good, I'll download it and give it a whirl
tomorrow.

Hi Rick,

All the previous posters have made some really good suggestions
regarding disk cloning, so I will not touch that. If I may, though, I'd
like to suggest the following.

- When you clone to a new drive, your partition size will be identical
to your previous drive. To take full advantage of the larger drive,
please remember that you can increase (extend) the size of your
partition in Vista Disk Management. If you get a chance, please give
this link a check:

<http://www.vista4beginners.com/How-to-manage-your-disks-using-only-
Windows-Vista-Disk-Management-tool>

Please scroll down to "How to extend a partition" and follow the
instructions. After that you should be good to go.

- I doubt that this will affect you, but I'll bring it up anyway. I
have heard rumors that some of the real early Vista PCs had IDE drives
instead of SATA drives. I am not able to confirm this, but it's some
rumor I heard a long time back. Before you acquire/install a new drive,
please check out the connector on the back of the existing drive. If it
looks like the connector in this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#IDE_and_ATA-1

You will have an IDE drive. Depending on the size of the drive you
desire to install, you may need a mobo BIOS upgrade to support it. On
the other hand if the connector on the back of the drive looks like the
connector on this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA

You'll be golden and should not have any problems. I'm currently
running a 2TB in my desktops and I'm really happy about it.

Enjoy your new drive and IHTH.

Rick

 

[wilby]

A third choice is Macrium Reflect, which has a free version. No time
limit, but limited functionality (no incremental backups).

You can directly Clone your old drive to your new drive and then remove
the old drive. This is simple.

Or you can IMAGE (not clone) your old drive to an external temporary
drive and then use that image to create your new drive, and save the
image for insurance against a future crash.

Here is my experience with partition IMAGING software. I tested at least
six free versions and the purchased Acronis. I didn't test cloning.

The easiest to use, when restoring Win 7/64 pro, to a brand new never
used hard drive, was the free version of Macrium Reflect. A close second
was Acronis paid for version. Both worked the first time.

The difference? Macrium made it harder to make mistakes in making
choices during the restore process.

All other brands of imaging software caused me problems and some of them
simply never completed a bootable restore. This is only my experience.

In any case I strongly recommend, if imaging, that the user MUST create
a bootable CD that will be used to boot the computer when the old
Windows drive is removed and a new empty drive in installed. After
creating the CD, following the imaging software's instructions, the user
must test boot the CD a few times to be certain that it really boots on
your computer.

Now make your image, verify it, change hard drives, boot with CD,
restore external image to new drive, and then boot up new drive.

Now you can increase the partition size if desired. Easeus and Partition
Wizard are both free and work well.

Wil

 

[Rick]

I have a a second computer with Vista installed, however it's on an 80 gig
hard drive which is pretty full, AIUI everything can be transferred onto a
larger drive using a 'clone' programme such as Norton Ghost, however this
seems a bit pricey at £40.00 for something that I will probably use maybe
only once or twice, can someone please advise me the best way of going
about this task and maybe provide a few pointers on any difficulties that
I may encounter and on how best to avoid them, TIA.

Many thanks to everyone for their very helpful input, I now know more than I
did about cloning.

First of all I took Ed's advice and downloaded Paragon free backup, I had to
supply them with my name and e-mail address and they then sent me some
product codes to activate it.

However when I came to use it I found that it was so complex (for me at
least!) that I eventually wound up using the Wizard, however after about an
hour all I wound up with was a number of of compressed backup files on the
new hard disk and maybe because I'm rather thick I still couldn't manage to
find a way of cloning the original drive.

I then tried downloading EASEUS Todo, and what a joy! It suited my limited
capabilities admirably, it installed without a murmur or any questions
asked, on running it I was immediately confronted with several options,
which included, Backup, Partitioning, Cloning, I clicked on the Cloning box
which informed me that 'all of the (unwanted backup) files on the
destination drive would be deleted', I clicked OK and within around 40
minutes I was using the new drive with everything installed in exactly the
same way as on the old 80 gig one, even the firewall and anti virus programs
were running perfectly.
Once again many thanks to everyone who took the trouble to reply to my
original request, as they say, I'm now one happy bunny!

 

[Ed Cryer]

Many thanks to everyone for their very helpful input, I now know more
than I did about cloning.

First of all I took Ed's advice and downloaded Paragon free backup, I
had to supply them with my name and e-mail address and they then sent me
some product codes to activate it.

However when I came to use it I found that it was so complex (for me at
least!) that I eventually wound up using the Wizard, however after about
an hour all I wound up with was a number of of compressed backup files
on the new hard disk and maybe because I'm rather thick I still couldn't
manage to find a way of cloning the original drive.

I then tried downloading EASEUS Todo, and what a joy! It suited my
limited capabilities admirably, it installed without a murmur or any
questions asked, on running it I was immediately confronted with several
options, which included, Backup, Partitioning, Cloning, I clicked on the
Cloning box which informed me that 'all of the (unwanted backup) files
on the destination drive would be deleted', I clicked OK and within
around 40 minutes I was using the new drive with everything installed in
exactly the same way as on the old 80 gig one, even the firewall and
anti virus programs were running perfectly.
Once again many thanks to everyone who took the trouble to reply to my
original request, as they say, I'm now one happy bunny!

Great news. Maybe we've all found out why that EASEUS wins the
popularity stakes on Cnet.
I'm sticking with Paragon, though. I've been using it for ages and it
works well for me. I just take fortnightly full backups with it, for use
as required. And until my needs change it's the one for me.

Ed

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

You can directly Clone your old drive to your new drive and then remove
the old drive. This is simple.

Or you can IMAGE (not clone) your old drive to an external temporary
drive and then use that image to create your new drive, and save the
image for insurance against a future crash.

Here is my experience with partition IMAGING software. I tested at least
six free versions and the purchased Acronis. I didn't test cloning.

The easiest to use, when restoring Win 7/64 pro, to a brand new never
used hard drive, was the free version of Macrium Reflect. A close second
was Acronis paid for version. Both worked the first time.

The difference? Macrium made it harder to make mistakes in making
choices during the restore process.

All other brands of imaging software caused me problems and some of them
simply never completed a bootable restore. This is only my experience.

In any case I strongly recommend, if imaging, that the user MUST create
a bootable CD that will be used to boot the computer when the old
Windows drive is removed and a new empty drive in installed. After
creating the CD, following the imaging software's instructions, the user
must test boot the CD a few times to be certain that it really boots on
your computer.

Now make your image, verify it, change hard drives, boot with CD,
restore external image to new drive, and then boot up new drive.

Now you can increase the partition size if desired. Easeus and Partition
Wizard are both free and work well.

Wil

Did you mean to address the OP?

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Many thanks to everyone for their very helpful input, I now know more than I
did about cloning.

First of all I took Ed's advice and downloaded Paragon free backup, I had to
supply them with my name and e-mail address and they then sent me some
product codes to activate it.

However when I came to use it I found that it was so complex (for me at
least!) that I eventually wound up using the Wizard, however after about an
hour all I wound up with was a number of of compressed backup files on the
new hard disk and maybe because I'm rather thick I still couldn't manage to
find a way of cloning the original drive.

I then tried downloading EASEUS Todo, and what a joy! It suited my limited
capabilities admirably, it installed without a murmur or any questions
asked, on running it I was immediately confronted with several options,
which included, Backup, Partitioning, Cloning, I clicked on the Cloning box
which informed me that 'all of the (unwanted backup) files on the
destination drive would be deleted', I clicked OK and within around 40
minutes I was using the new drive with everything installed in exactly the
same way as on the old 80 gig one, even the firewall and anti virus programs
were running perfectly.
Once again many thanks to everyone who took the trouble to reply to my
original request, as they say, I'm now one happy bunny!

Thanks for the update. Glad you had success.

And you had some new info for me. I tried EASEUS Todo a long time
ago,but it crashed on my machine. Maybe after your report I'll try
again, although the last I looked they claimed it would only work on
32-bit Windows. I'll check up on that out later.

BTW, I have used EASEUS Disk Copy with no problems.

 

[Justin!!!]

I have a a second computer with *Vista* installed

I'm sorry to hear that.

 

[Rick]

I'm sorry to hear that.

Well it was reinstalled on an older machine which hadn't been used in quite
a 'long' while and after blowing the dust off and somewhere around 300
updates later (I'm not kidding and still they come!) It doesn't appear to
run too badly, in fact far better than I ever remember, maybe it's something
to do with all those updates..