Hard Drive upgrade question.

Hello Guys and Gals,

I have a question about upgrading a hard drive on a Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit.

First I will explain, My system has many hard drives in it, and all my sata slots are used/taken.

Now my drive F: which is not the boot drive is very near full and i want to replace it with a larger drive, but I am unsure of how to do this. I have added many drives in the past but they were new drives and were not replacing any.

So my question is there a way to change the drive to a larger drive and have all the data moved to the new drive?

Or can a sata connector have a "Y" junction to simply add another drive and leave drive F: alone?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Gren

 

SATA connections are one per cable. You could purchase an enclosure, put the new hard drive in it and then copy the info from your "F" drive to it. Afterward just swap the two drives and do whatever you wish with your current "F" drive. Personally, I'd keep your current "F" drive in the enclosure and use it for backup images of your System drive. It will save a lot of headaches should you develop problems with your System drive.

 

Hello Mdonah,

Thanks for the help with my questions.

I think I will do as you suggested, but now I have further questions.

So when I get the new drive and I connect it to the enclosure and then copy my data from drive F: to the new drive, how do i swap it?

Would the new drive be assigned a different drive letter?
Or do I manually set the new drive to drive f: after i copy the data/programs to it?

Thanks in advance
Gren

 

You would connect the enclosure (after you've put the hard drive into it) via USB cable to your computer. Windows will assign a drive letter to it. Is your current "F" drive internal (inside the computer) or external (connected by USB cable) or are the different "drives" actually partitions on a single or multiple internal physical drives?

 

Give your new drive a unique name and you'll know which it is regardless of letter assignment.

 

Hey GrenPara
Why not use one of these or similar. They will probably be cheaper anywhere else in the world than over here. You can use docks like this for both 2.5" and 3.5" drives so they are a handy thing to have and reasonably cheap. Some docks don't even need to be connected to the PC to copy the data from one drive to the other drive as you just press a button and the dock copies everything from one HDD to the other HDD

 

Hi,

Depending on you $ you might consider this option.

Buy new Sata drive, remove one the other drives that isn't your windows / operating system drive default C: and to be cloned F: drives. Then insert your new drive. Then clone F: drive to the "newly purchased": drive.

I would advise take note of all the drives capacity and brand names as some clone programs can mess with drive letters, making it awkward and frustratingly dangerous, accidentally copying over another hard drive (doh) or cloning the wrong drive. OR just remove all drives leaving installed only the o/s C: & F: and new replacement to be cloned to drive just to be safe.

If the cloned to, replacing the F: drive, has a larger capacity you then have this option. Remove the original F: after cloning is completed. Then restart P.C re-assign the new cloned drive letter the be the F: drive. Should be fine from there.

Like wise, depending on your imaging software, you maybe able to re-lable the replacement disk as F: - shut down and remove the original F: drive and restart.

If you had to remove any other drives to do this method, then for safety sake try to put them on the same cable as they were removed from. You should be fine.

Im not sure 100% how the newer o/s handle drive names or various imaging software works, but some of them would automatically re-assign the next hard drive letter (at least with ide drives) on restart if drives were missing.

If you had a drive in the wrong order after reinstalling and restarting, your desktop short cuts for example, could stop working. As now they pointed, to a automatically newly assigned letter / drive without that program on it, so it pointed to an invalid target.

If you wanted to avoid this issue, its easy enough just to create an empty folder on a drive before starting the clone process, naming it after the drive letter. So for H: "this is H drive" so you could check afterwards incase you had issues with shortcuts not working. Then just rename that drive letter appropriately.

don't forget to have fun :wave

 

Hey guys,

Thanks for all the help and suggestions, lots of good info.

Now for some further knowledge, I have a hot swap dock already and it is my 6th sata slot. I use it to store important data, and drive ""F:" is in sata port 4.

So Let me see if I get this all correctly.

First my drive "F:" is the drive I want to upgrade to a larger HDD.

Now what I should do is connect the new hard drive to my HDD docking port and format it. So at this point once the format is done I can assign the new HDD a drive letter like "Q".

Then I run EaseUS TODO Backup or other cloning program (I bought 2 different ones). At this point once choose clone drive "F:" to the new " drive I just formatted and assigned the drive letter"Q:".

Once the software finishes the clone and I resize the HDD size to use whole drive. Then I shutdown and remove the old drive "F:" and put the new drive "Q:" in the old drive "F:"'s sata port.

Now when my system restarts I should now change the drive from drive "Q:" to drive "F:". Then as long as everything is correct all my old links for software should stay working.

Is what I said above correct?
I feel so stupid as adding a new drive is easy, but I find changing a full hard drive to a larger drive a pain. Once I know how I will remember how which will be great.

Thanks in advance
Gren

 

When you remove your current "F" drive and put the new one in it's place, Windows may assign it drive letter "F". But before you find out it assigns a different drive letter, give the drive a unique name like Imandy Mann suggested. I always do this so I know which drive is which because I run 3 versions of Windows on my computer and every time I boot to a different version, the drive letters get changed but, not the drive name (see att'd). You can give the drive a name by clicking on it in Computer and about a second later click on it again. The name field will become editable. After you've assigned a name, click on an open area of the window and the name will be locked.

You certainly seem to have the rest of it right.

 

Hey guys,

Thanks to all the help you guys gave me I will be attempting the switch on the weekend.

I could not have done it with all your help and the step by step process you all gave me.

Thanks again.
Have a great Holiday Season.
Gren

 

Easiest way?
1) remove D and E drives (assuming C is boot) even hot swap bays and CDROMs
2) plug new drive in (no telling what letter will come up)
3) transfer F to the new drive
4) put the system back together with all drives

 

Hello Doa,

Thanks for the idea but I was worried to try it that way.

Since move of my drives have taskbar programs that load as well as startup programs, I thought if I did it that way I could cause a system crash, or screw up my registry.

My drive F: and my hot swap drive are the only drives with no windows startup programs. And since I have never done this used HDD swap I just didn't want any possible major issue, since I don't know what is the safest way.

Anyways thanks for the idea.
Have a Great Holiday Season.
Gren