Just picked up a brand new 160 GB hard drive for a bargain of a price. I currently have the (original) 20 GB drive as the primary (system) disk and a 40 GB disk as slave.
I’d like to get rid of the 20 GB drive since it’s the lowest capacity of all 3. But it’s my system disk and I’d really rather not wipe it out and start from scratch if it’s at all avoidable.
Would it work if I cleared the 40 GB disk entirely (I’ll copy it to my iPod for now), then Ghosted the contents of the 20 GB disk onto the 40 GB disk and made *that *the new primary disk?
Then I could just add my new 160 GB disk as a new slave.
That will work just dandy. However I would check the access time, cache, and RPM on the new 160 gig first. It may be quite a bit faster than that old 40 gig, and if it is then you would be better off putting your system on the faster drive.
Ghost should let you copy over the disk image to either drive and then let you expand the partition to include the rest of the hard drive. Alternatively you could set the partition size to whatever you want, and then use disk manager to create a new partition for other data.
If you already have Norton Ghost, so be it. If you’re considering buying the software, I’d suggest that you check out Acronis True Image 8.0 which is available in a free trial software version. I bought it for doing complete system backups to a USB drive, and it’s a sweet program.
The last time I upgraded the disk on my Windows box, I used Acronis MigrateEasy to move everything from the old disk to the new disk. It was painless, fast, and I didn’t have to reinstall any software.