How do I get the image back on a new hard drive

I need to upgrade my primary hard drive. It is a 4 year old 10 Gb Western Digital. (OK you can stop laughing now) I also have a 120 Gb D:/ drive where I have most of my data and large programs installed.

I want to upgrade my C drive to 120 Gb as well but don't want to go through the process of reinstalling windows and all the programs that are on it and those on my D drive as well. From what I can see in the forums and FAQ's here I think I need to create an exact image of my C drive onto CD's or DVD's using an imaging program of some kind. That seems pretty straight forward. My problem is that I am not sure what to do after that.

After I make the image of my C drive do I simply swap the new drive for the old one and stick the CD with the image into the CD drive? Are images like this bootable so that I can then just copy everything back to the new drive and be ready to boot up from my hard drive at that point?

This is a home brew machine that I put together myself, running Windows XP SP2 with all the latest patches, 512 MB ram, 1.3 Ghz Athlon CPU, CD-ROM and NEC DVD ROM/Burner. Let me know what else you might need to know.

 

If you are thinking of making a disc that will put the operating system and all your data on the new hard drive, i dont think that will work. You can back up your data to cd-dvd. I believe you will still have to install windows, maybe somebody else will set us straight. ed

 

hi, norton ghost can do the job all you need to do is install a new hdd as slave and then follow the instructions in ghost, it costs about 40 pounds (english money), you do not need to format or install your os

 

Thanks,

I just want to make sure I understand what I am doing before I destroy my existing windows install and stored data. So please correct me if I have anything wrong in this overview:

1. I buy a new HDD and a copy of Norton Ghost
2. Open up my PC and uninstall my existing D drive (My current slave drive)
3. Install my new HDD in the now empty slot where my Current D Drive WAS located and configure it as a slave
4. Run Norton Ghost and copy an image of my C drive to my new HDD
5. Shut down my PC, remove the old 10 Gb C drive that I am replacing
6. Swap the new HDD into the slot I took my original C drive out of and swap the pins around so it is now the Master
7. Reinstall the D drive (Still configured as a slave) that I took out to do the ghost transfer from my original C drive to the new HDD drive
8. Close everything back up
9. Boot my PC and have everything in place that was on my old C drive with 110 more Gb's of empty space (Assuming I get another 120 Gb drive to replace my current 10 Gb HDD)

It's really that easy? I have a fairly new main board, I think the BIOS should automatically recognize the new drive as being larger but if not, do I just go into the BIOS setup and reset the C drive parameters?

 

All the major HDD manufactures have free utilities to copy or transfer all data from one drive to another, including a boot drive. ( no need to buy any ghost or what ever)

WD utility is "Data Lifeguard Tools"

As I type on another PC I'm coping a Maxtor SATA boot drive to an Maxtor IDE with "MaxBlast 3" (Maxtor's free utility) it will take me about 30min to copy approx 60gb

When using the Utilities you have to select coping a Boot drive



By the way, nothing wrong with Ghost

 

Thom_D,

Please do report back here to tell us all what you did, and if it was successful or not?