hard drive.

old hard drive full, want to transfer to bigger hard drive in same pc. using windows xp home. thank you.

 

Is your intention to make the larger drive our primary (c:\) drive?
If so, there are many programs that will allow you to make a perfect clone of the second drive.
One such program is Drive2Drive.
I have used it and found it very easy to use.
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Disk_Maintenance_and_Repair_Utilities/Drive2Drive.html

It is a shareware program, but it is fully functional as long as you are not resizing partitions.

 

old hard drive is a 40 gig. the new one is 200 gig. wont the partitions be resized, and when i clone the drive.will i be able to do microsoft up dates on it. thank you

 

No this won't cause you any problem.
Drive2Drive will simply copy your 40G drive onto your 200G drive, leaving the remaining space free.
Once that is done you shold remove both drives from the computer; change the jumper settings to make the 200G your primary and your 40G the slave; reinstall them into your computer and reboot.
You should now have a 200G "C" drive with 160G free.
Your second drive will be labeled "D" or "E" of "F" depending on how the computer names the CD drive(s).
Once you are satisfied that everything is up and running properly on the "C" drive, you can delete the duplicate data on your old 40G drive.
Or if you prefer, you can leave the old 40G drive out of the computer and save it as a backup.
If you don't need the space right now, I would suggest that you leave the 40G out at least for a few days to be completely certain you haven't lost anything.

 

With such a LACK of information about your computer, making recommendations or suggestions is nearly impossible.

If yours is a standard desktop computer the solution is much simpler than if it's a Laptop. For instance, if its a desktop, you can usually install the second drive and do a clone from the old drive to the new one, then remove the old drive.

However, on a laptop, you cannot have two drives installed at the same time.
See what I mean? On a laptop the job gets much more complicated.

In either case, I'd probably clean up the old drive to remove every file that's not required and then do a chkdsk and defrag before doing anything else.

Do you regularly use any cleanup software, like window's "Disk Cleanup" to eliminate junk files from your HD?

Then I'd make a "Ghost" image to DVD or EXternal HD.
Then I'd install the new drive in place of the old one and do a Ghost Restore of the Image file. The new drive should then be bootable, just like your old drive. I do this all the time in my computer business, when a customer wants to upgrade to a larger HD, or when the old HD is failing.

I tried the link previously posted, for "Drive2Drive" and got an error message that the page could not be found. Maybe because the link was truncated.
Doing a Google search on "Drive2Drive" I found its home site and discovered that it's not written for XP, Vista or Win2k.
I was then redirected to this site:
http://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/

Where, I discovered their new program, called aptly enough, "Casper". Probably a take-off on "Ghost".
It appears to be Retail Software.
Since I have Ghost and know how well it works on all drives and all format types, I doubt I'll be 'buying' Casper.

Cheers Mate!
The Shadow :cool

 

The link I provided for Drive2Drive is working fine.
I have no idea why Shadow had a problem with it.
This program most certainly does work for XP.
I have used it successfully to transfer XP loaded drives on several occasions.
Disk Cleanup is fine, but you will rarely realize more than a few Mb of recovered space.

Laptops do cause an inconvenience. it is necessary to purchase a external drive adapter to clone your drive, but they can be had for a very small investment.

Making a "ghost" image to a DVD is a good idea, providing of course, you have a DVD writer.

All things considered, I stand by my original recommendation.

 

the pc is desk top 4600 dell,went to drive2drive page it doesnot handle xp, went to driveImage page,they both do the same thing? right ,what wood you do.thank you.

 

I don't understand what they have done to the Drive2Drive program.
The copy I have works with XP, but I can see that their site claims it doesn't????????
Not sure about that one

In any case there is a freeware program called HDClone that says it will do what you need
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/hdclonefree.html
You do need either a floppy drive or a CD writer to use HDClone. You put the program on a bootable disk and then run it from there.
I've never used this program so I can't tell you anything more about it than that.

 

I've been using Ghost.exe to back up and clone HD's since it's release in 1997 from the original publisher (a New Zealand company).
Being in the computer business, I get to use Ghost just about every day.

I'm still using Ghost 2003 (latest build) to back up all sorts of drives on every computer imaginable. I run it from a boot floppy and have a copy of that disk on a bootable Flash Drive and CD. It will only write to a CD/DVD and make it bootable if I boot from A:. That's the way it was written, oh so long ago.

Having your backup program on your HD, which can crash, is somewhere between foolish and redundant.
I've even made Ghost backups of HD's that were failing and would not even boot up a system (to save valuable data files, before the drive totally died).

I downloaded and evaluated "Casper" and found it completely lacking, for my needs.

Ghost 2003 is no longer supported by Symantec, which gives rise to the idea that it's 'Abandonware', in many peoples minds. It's currently available FREE from many sources.

I got my original copy as Bonus Software on a Soho Motherboard driver CD.

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow :cool