Hey ho. My poor laptop is feeling the brunt of my ever-increasing CD collection and rapidly expanding photo albums.. Is it possible, and easy, to clone my HDD onto a new, larger drive? I CBA to reinstall Windows, my programs, add-ons, updates, etc etc. So if I could 'mirror' EVERYTHING on my current HDD onto a new one, and just swap them, that would be awesome.. USB HDD isn't an option- I have one for backups and media overflow- I use my laptop as a desktop, so my 3 USBs are rammed with keyboard, mouse, and USB soundcard for pumping my 'chunes. I thought it would break/be obselete by the time 60gb became limited, but I love it soooo much and have no reason to upgrade any time soon! :icon_bigg
I have no experience with cloning HDD's but you could get software like norton ghost which would do what you want and allow you top clone your HDD.
yes ghost should seem like a good solution you could use a win98 usb boot stick on your laptop and use ghost to make a complete image of your drive (make sure you have enough room) and burn that image to a cd so if you have to again use the boot usb and re ghost the image back to the hard drive
I just did this a week ago, but I can't remember the program I used. It was free, and even cloned the ENTIRE drive, bit-by-bit, including my OSX86 partion. As soon as I get home from work I'll see if I can find that bad boy. It was a simple matter of burning a CD and then booting from it, and waiting a few hours. On the other hand, I used that particular program because of my weird partitioning/dual-booting, and thus I would also recommend Ghost if you just need to clone a simple windows drive with one partition. Should be quite straightforward.
Possible and easy. Use something like Norton Ghost and it's a doddle. You have 3 options: 1. Put the hard drive in a desktop PC (use adapter if IDE, just use SATA cables if SATA) along with the new drive and clone. 2. Put the new hard drive in a 2.5" external USB caddy and connect to the laptop. Clone. Swap drives over. 3. Connect up your USB hard drive. Clone to an image on the external drive. Swap over internal drives. Clone image to new drive. If you're cloning say an 80Gb partition onto a 120Gb hard drive, you may well find you only have an 80Gb partition. If this is the case, use a Partition tool such as Partition Magic to adjust the size of the partition.
Get a usb to hard drive cable. Something like this will do everything: http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-USB-DSC5-3-5-Inch-Converter-Adapter/dp/B000HJ99DI/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1237880089&sr=8-1 Use the maxblast software to clone the drive. Simple to use. Make sure you clone the right way (if you clone the empty to the full, you'll lose everything). http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=MaxBlast_5&vgnextoid=7add8b9c4a8ff010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD Their license says that one of your drives is supposed to be a maxtor or seagate.
I've always used Acronis's programs back when I worked for the IT guy in high school. We'd just go make a back up of one computer that was in the best working order and at the start of a semester restore it to all the computers of the same hardware, because people are idiots and get the computers loaded down with spyware and viruses really badly
