I have a dell computer with a small hard drive and another hard drive (stock) that is much bigger. I want to exchange the small for big and I’m unsure how to prepare the new harddrive to run in the dell PC. I will be running vista.
Any advice?
You need to provide more details. Do you want the new drive to replace the exisiting boot drive? If that’s the case, you will have to partition the drive, format it, and install Vista and all its updates. Then install your applications. You can then move all the data from the current smaller drive to the new drive. Here is some info.
Check the new drive manufacturer’s website. It should have a utility for imaging the old drive to the new one. This moves the OS and all the contents so that you don’t have to reinstall anything.
Is there a drive bay and connectors available for a second hard drive?
If so, why don’t you simply add the second drive, and keep the first (small) drive for the operating system and programs, leaving the new drive as your storage drive?
It’s easier to do, will help your system run more smoothly, and will give you even more space than using the new drive by itself.
If you cannot find that utility, you can download a utility to do a drive image yourself. You would download it as a burnable image of a live CD, burn that image to a CD, then boot from the CD with both the old and new hard drives connected so that you can copy the disk image over. A program called, “Clonezilla” works very well at doing this.
Macrium Reflect FREE Edition I’ve been dealing with imaging hard drives for years, and this OS imaging and transfer program makes it the easiest it’s ever been. I recommend you use this to set up the new drive to be the new OS drive.