I have a 250GB hard drive which is pretty much full. I’ve gotten a new 80GB drive that I would like to use for my OS (winXP), program files and anything related. I know that it will fit - the “windows” and “my programs” directories contain a total of about 15GB. However, I have a feeling that if I just copy the directories from one disk to the other it will not be bootable.
In the past when I have upgraded to larger hard drives, I have used a Seagate utility to clone the entire drive, but that won’t allow me to exclude certain directories on the source hard drive.
Is your 250GB drive partitioned? If it is, copy all your data files from the C: drive to another partition, until you have less than 80GB of used space on your C: drive, then create an image of the C: drive using something like Acronis True Image and restore it to the new hard disk.
If your 250GB drive is not partitioned, partition it using something like Partition Magic, then follow the steps mentioned above.
You’d be far better off doing a fresh install on the new C drive even if replicating the programs is a PITA. I’ve found at least 70% + of the programs I’ve installed become useless or completely unused over time, so re-installs are not all that painful as I can leave a huge bunch of crap behind, and I consequently get cleaner and faster boots & overall performance…
Whatever you do make sure you make the new partition bootable before installing anything.