I am thinking of purchasing a 100GB Hard Drive and would like to know what would be the procedure to transfer what I have already unto the new drive? I don't wish to have to re-install windows or anything else and would like to "transfer" everything from my existing 40Gb drive to the new drive, I simply need more space, help please? Thanks.
Getting a bigger Hard Drive?
- Thread starter mikehende
- Start date
GavinO
Expert
I would install the 100GB as an additional drive in the system, leaving the existing 40GB for the operating system and software, and move your data files over to the new drive. I think there's also a way to remap Documents and Settings to be on the new drive rather than the system drive (amazing how much stuff collects there).
If you have other plans for the 40GB (ie, you plan on making the new drive the system drive), best solution is to do a reinstall. You could probably move an image of the old drive to the new one, and it would probably boot, but my experience with trying to move a Windows installation to new hardware is that it is far less a headache in the long run to bite the bullet and do the reinstall (you'll probably wind up doing it eventually).
My other thought was to the size of the drive; 100GB is a relatively small drive these days. While those 500GB Deskstars may be a bit extravagant, a 250-300GB drive might be a better investment long-term. $/GB seems to be pretty flat up through that range. With the larger (ie newer) drives, you also benefit from things like bigger buffers.
If you have other plans for the 40GB (ie, you plan on making the new drive the system drive), best solution is to do a reinstall. You could probably move an image of the old drive to the new one, and it would probably boot, but my experience with trying to move a Windows installation to new hardware is that it is far less a headache in the long run to bite the bullet and do the reinstall (you'll probably wind up doing it eventually).
My other thought was to the size of the drive; 100GB is a relatively small drive these days. While those 500GB Deskstars may be a bit extravagant, a 250-300GB drive might be a better investment long-term. $/GB seems to be pretty flat up through that range. With the larger (ie newer) drives, you also benefit from things like bigger buffers.
Hey Gavin, how's it going? I think your idea might be best especially since I only need the bigger drive to store music and video files, I will look into it to see if I can "add" another drive on this pc and will get back to you. I had considered getting a much bigger drive but Dell told me that 160GB is the max size that they can recommend.
Contacted Dell, they said I can add another drive and do what I have planned which is to keep the system drive as the "master" and make the 2nd drive the slave. I guess I will need some help to configure the 2nd drive but they should be able to tell me how to do so when the time comes.
GavinO
Expert
Ah, if you're going through your system vendor/maintaining warranty, that does sort of limit options ...
Configuration of the new drive is pretty easy; under Windows 2K/XP, there's even a nice admin tool to partition and format the drive.
Configuration of the new drive is pretty easy; under Windows 2K/XP, there's even a nice admin tool to partition and format the drive.
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