Hardrive copy question Please Help

About how long will it take to copy a hardrive with 48gig on it.

I am ready to install another hardrive to give me more room since I am out of room on the old one.

If anyone has an idea on the time it will take to do this let me know please.

I have a Sony Vaio with a pentium 4, 2.0ghz, and 1gig of ram original installation.

I will be using Partition Wizard home edition bootable disk to perform this process.

 

Unless you do not have the space, just keep the old drive in the unit if a desktop or Tower, make Slave, and make the new one Master. As for your orig. question, it really depends if it is PATA or SATA, and the output of the hard drive, which the manufacturer would have that info. On average 48gb could take at least a night of you sleeping in bed, and still have it doing its thing when you leave for school or work.

 

I have no choice, I am out of space on the c drive. When Sony set it up they set c drive to small with no way to expand the partition.

The new drive is a SATA style.

 

TSlavin,
Do you mean clone or copy? If you clone the HD using Acronis or Macrium Reflect available at MG's then this will copy all files and the OS to another drive or DVD's and take less time.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Macrium_Reflect_FREE_Edition_d6034.html

 

I am using the partition wizard program, so I believe that it copies the hardrive.

 

Isn't copy and clone the same?

 

Copying just copys the files and folders on the disc, but as far as I know it does not copy the entire operating system and programs with all the settings and adjustments that the operator "You" have made. Cloning takes an exact image of the HD at the point you invoked it.

Maybe others will come in and clarify this more than I have.

 

Partition Wizard says that it would copy win xp also.

Thats is what I need to know I guess.

 

As far as I know Partition Wizard would be able to copy all files necessary to boot. Just to verify you are running XP? (Because on Vista/7 there is a limitation on resizing partitions. Letting a 3rd party software like P/W do it can cause problems.)

I haven't done copying partitions to a new drive in quite a while so take this with a grain of salt. I would think 2 minutes per GB would be a generous estimation of the time so 90 minutes would be my outside estimate.

Did your new HD come with a CD? There used to be a utility on those CD to copy your old drive to the new one. Which brand/model HD did you buy--I could check to see how their utility works.

The other question is how is your current HD laid out for partitions. You have 48GB for C: but do you have other partitions? What is the total size of the drive? (I'm wondering if a "Disc Copy" using P/W might be a good option since it would copy everything including a recovery partition if one exists on the old HD.)

And lastly, you are sure the PC will accept a SATA drive? The other is IDE/PATA?

 

Yes I am running xp.
The partition on c drive is only 16.5gig total,and that is where Sony put all their programs and xp, d is the remainder. The drive has a total of 60gig of space and only 48gig of files.