yet another question about swapping out (or changing) a hard drive.

My C drive is starting to emit a nice grinding sound, so I’m burning and backing up.

My C drive is 20 GB, my “F” HD 80 GB.

All my program files are stored on my C drive, unfortunately.

I’m interested in getting a replacement C HD AND an external HD, both in the 150 GB range.

I’d prefer not to reload the entire OS, download all the driver updates, yadda, yadda.
What’s the best way to transfer all my C drive stuff over to my F HD, yank out the C drive, and replace it with a big new C HD? I’d like to keep the program files on the F HD from now on and keep C mean and lean.

Please advise. Carnac’s crystal ball is a bit cloudy.

The type of software you need is called ghosting, disk imaging, or cloning software. There are a bunch that can do it and some of them are free. Companies often use Norton Ghost for that task. It costs about $60 if it is worth it to you. It clones the entire thing onto this image file that it can rexpand onto a new hard drive and every nitpicky little thing is where you left it.

You can google for those types of software and look at download.com to see which is best for you.

You can almost just run regular backup software to move everything to an external drive but Windows locks a few key files for writing and they probably won’t get moved.

The steps to get a new, iamged c: drive may or may not be tricky. If you can boot from a USB external HD, you are golden. Just image it first, put in the new drive, boot from the external and image the new C: drive.

Come to think of it, I am sure that Norton Ghost builds a boot CD to do exactly what you want. That would make things a lot easier.

I’ve been kind of wondering this myself.

I bought a 250GB HD and installed it on my main comp about a month ago (so my C Drive is 80GB, my F Drive 250GB), and have been wondering the best way to move all my data/program files/installed apps to my F Drive, so I can reformat WinXP on my C Drive and not lose any of my data.

On a related note, if I move all my data/programs to F Drive and reformat the OS on C Drive, would it be better (and possible) to create say, a 10GB partition on the C Drive solely for the OS, and then have the rest of the disk in a seperate partition for programs/data? That would mean that when my comp starts slowing down and I want to reformat the OS again, I’d just have to reformat that one partition, correct?

I’m fairly certain that some retail hard drives come with cloning software.

Usually, a new HD comes with software to copy partitions. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that said software does not resize the partition. So if was 20GB before, the new one is 20GB.

Standard partioning software like Partition Magic does both.

Just did this a couple of weeks ago. My HD was getting sluggish and I noticed that it was pretty hot, so I bought a larger replacement drive with the intention of cloning the old one.
I’ve done this previously with Seagate’s DiscWizard utility bundled with their drives and it worked well. I always did this on “bare bones” boxes that didn’t need MS Office and such.
When I tried this on my home box, I found that Windows XP worked normally, but most of my applications, including Office, didn’t work. Maxtor’s MaxBlast utility had the same problem.
It seemed that some registry settings didn’t transfer correctly.

After a day of messing around with it and scratching my head, I tried what I hadn’t tried before - Norton Ghost’s Clone function.

Worked great. Ghost not only transfered my OS and installed apps correctly, but created the same partitions as I had in the old drive - but didn’t limit the partitions to the same size as the old. Both partitions are now much larger.

Highly recommended.

I guess the question needs to be asked: How much hassle is it to reload XP–plus load all the program files, get the updates, tweak the settings, yadda yadda?

Are we talking maybe 4 hours start to finish, or a good day? Doesn’t it sometimes make sense to get rid of the clutter and start fresh?
[I’ve reloaded Win 2000 years ago–before I had a broadband connection. What a hassle getting all those driver updates.]

Don’t even consider doing that. I give that advise to everyone and some haven’t listened at their own peril and they will never consider doing that again. You will be hurting if you have to reinstall XP and all applications and updates and everything else from scratch. You have certainly made a lot of changes that you don’t even think about over time. You will have to do them all in one shot and sometimes in sequence to make it work. Little problems can add an hour a piece. I work in IT and it literally takes days to get everything working right again. You can easily ruin a weekend working more than 8 hours each day. 4 hours will not cut it.

I would buy Norton or a comparable product and ghost the whole thing. Labor and data wise, it is a sound investment. Read reviews online for those types of products to see what works for you.

After you get that done, backup software is easy and some is free. I use the free Corbian backup software and it does incremental backups of files every night and only takes 1 - 3 minutes despite heavy computer use.

Listen to the nice man who is giving you good advice. Next time I upgrade, I plan on doing it via a giant external firewire drive. Back up to, then restore from.
A nice clean registry just ain’t worth the pain - if it’s a concern buy some scrubbin software to get rid of the encrustations.

Whoa. After reading you post, I started gettingnasty flashbacks from the times I reloaded my old Win 2000 OS–I’m talking TWICE. Just getting everything up and running and re-optimized was a huge pain and time waster. I must have 30-40 programs on my PC right now. Getting them all back would be a hassle.

As is, my XP–if not my dying HD–works fine. Must resist obsessive desire to have a spotless registry…

BTW, some sites recommend Acronis backup, others Norton. You prefer Norton, no?