Moving my OS to a new hard drive

Rakk

Rakk

The Awesome
Moderator
Ok, so when I got my PC last year, I should've got a bigger better hard drive, but at that point I didn't know that a bigger cache meant faster (hindsight is such a wonderful thing ...) and I certainly didn't know that my game would be offline for 2 weeks meaning I would suddenly be downloading lots of new games to try, therefore I'm going to get me a Caviar black drive (SSD's too pricey still) - probably next week, once I decide whether to get 640GB or 1TB one - note on my previous PC I never even filled my 250GB HDD.

So, the question, what's the best way of moving my OS to the new drive?

  • insert new HDD, fight with it, try and install Win7 on new drive whilst convincing my machine it doesn't want to use the current hard drive and then install everything else I've got on new drive (and hope that the MSDN license for my copy of Visual Studio is still valid)? This will obviously not be a speedy process, and I'm liable to forget something important

  • or get some software that will make an image of my current HDD and just restore onto said new drive? This does sound an awful lot more simple :) and requires finding no installation disks, but I don't know if there are any drawbacks with this.

Note: I've never moved an OS from one drive to another before, and generally try to stay away from doing such things on the grounds of the fact I'll probably screw something up in the process, so I'm not really sure how I'm going to do it at all anyway.
 
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pcdan

Bronze Level Poster
well you dont wanna directly want to copy past it over either way

id rather not risk it.

but you could probably use some sort of cloning software to do that but not 100% to sure.
try researching cloning software and how it works. thats the only thing that i kinda know might work or not

like you i dont touch the OS either
 
Pete

Pete

Bright Spark
Back in the day of being a poor student, we managed to copy Windows95 via an RS232 cable, replacing Win3.11 - took about 12 hours.

as Dan says unless you have some imaging software, i think the best way is going to be to install the OS on the new drive and re-install everything. I've always done it this way, you just know things are going to work; plus any junk you had installed previously is gone.
 
Rakk

Rakk

The Awesome
Moderator
Pete said:
as Dan says unless you have some imaging software,
Click to expand...

That was why I put the two thoughts I had down, total re-install or imaging software, was just wondering what people reckoned was the best way and if there were any downsides to imaging the whole lot.
 
Pete

Pete

Bright Spark
well if you have the software (or can borrow it from work), then hey-presto but personally i wouldn't splash out on it, just for the sake of spending a couple of hours installing stuff.

I don't see any downsides to using imaging software - by the time you you've googled and found a cheap or free version, you could probably have windows 7 up and running. but then i don't have many apps or games installed.

Googled and found : http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/
 
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LinearHD

LinearHD

Rising Star
You could take out the old HDD, insert the new one, boot from disk and then install onto the new HDD, and then somehow manually remove the old OS from the old HDD?
 
Fear

Fear

Prolific Poster
I would just do a clean install on the new drive and keep your stuff on your old drive to check that your license changes over ok first then if that works you can put all your stuff on your lovely clean new drive.
 
Rakk

Rakk

The Awesome
Moderator
Fear said:
I would just do a clean install on the new drive and keep your stuff on your old drive to check that your license changes over ok first then if that works you can put all your stuff on your lovely clean new drive.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I did think about that, but it's going to take an awful long time to reinstall everything and as I said earlier, I'm not entirely sure the MSDN license for Visual Studio is still valid, and not having that would be annoying to say the least.

I believe I can get hold of some imaging software, so hopefully that will sort it.
 
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pr1s0ner

Well-known member
Is there anything wrong with the existing drive?
Can you not just keep both? Copy all data, pics, music, videos, games whatever onto the new drive and leave the current one running windows.
 
Rakk

Rakk

The Awesome
Moderator
No, there's nothing wrong with the current drive, but the Caviar ones are faster and nicer, and it should speed up the OS booting, and various other bits and pieces - going from an 8MB cache to a 64MB cache should make for a hefty difference :).

But yeah, I don't need to do it, but I want to :)
 
vanthus

vanthus

Member Resting in Peace
Windows7 Is very capable of doing this without any other software,probably better In fact.All you need is a hard drive big enough to carry the image. It can be internal or external.

Goto Control Panel > Backup and Restore > Create a system image.(as I'm sure you know)

Also create a System Repair disc (although I'm sure that your original boot DVD will work).

If you have more than 2 internal hard drives one thing to check when you restore your drive is in the advanced options,because you have to unselect the drives you don't want to apply the saved image to.

If moving to a larger hard disk it will create an identically sized partition but once you boot into your new installation you can then have the Disk management "extend" the drive space.

All you have to do is open Windows Explorer > Right click on 'Computer' > Manage > Disk Management > Right click on the partition that holds the OS / select EXPAND/ then select next
 
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LinearHD

LinearHD

Rising Star
So after you did that, how would you remove the OS from the old drive? I want to know as this is what i'll probs have to do when I buy an SSD...
 
LinearHD

LinearHD

Rising Star
but that would remove EVERYTHING on the drive, not just the OS? It would be a bit of an effort to reinstall everything..
 
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