Need some help installing new HD into my notebook.

My existing 80GB HD is making a clacking sound, won't boot up, and is not recognized by the diagnostics (a Dell Latitude D620). It has been acting funny for a month now so this is not a huge surprise.

I've ordered a replacement 250GB drive. I've never added a hard drive to an existing system since Win 3.1 days, so I'm new at this. This is what I've got:

1. New hard drive (arriving soon).

2. The Dell came with no XP CD. It is/was loaded on the HD (I think as drive D. It had a 'C' and 'D' drive). It is XP SP3.

3. A full backup of the system as of a few months ago, using Paragon. Both the C and D drives.

4. I have restored bits and pieces of the 'Full Backup" which is on my External HD, but never the entire contents.

5. I did create the Paragon Emergency Restore CD which does operate when I boot up to CD.

I'm really at a loss about what to due to get this backup onto the new HD. I'm sure the new HD will have some sort of instructions but everything I've found so far on the internet assumes you have an installation CD of XP handy. (I never did.)

I'd like to restore it like the first one (one drive for XP and the Dell stuff) and the other drive for everything else, C drive. Unless it would be helpful to include a new partition since the drive is really large for my typical usage.

Thanks.

 

You can put the new drive in and boot the Paragon disk and do a recovery. If it does not resize the partitions, then you'll have to do that after you recover.

Usually they assume you can connect both drives and copy or 'clone' one from the other, being a laptop, you need a USB to IDE or SATA cable. So if you want to buy a cable you can use the drive manufacture's tools to clone and it usually does the resizing too, or just go with your Paragon back and recover.

 

Well. I got the new hard drive installed and running. It seems to be working fine so far...

..except the partitions were restored for the original 80gb drive and not the new drive's 250gb.

I really don't understand partitions much at all because I've never had to work with them.

Can it be 'adjusted' or do I have to do another Restore with new 'settings' for the 250gb to be available? I recall the screen where you can set the size of the drives but I really didn't understand it so I didn't change anything.

Thanks.

 

What I have now (all on Basic Hard Disk 0):

Local Disk (D) 7.8gb ..this is the Dell/Windows Restore stuff
Local Disk (C) 66.7gb.....Programs, Data.
"Unallocated" 158.3gb

If I right click on Unallocated it pops up the option to 'Create Partition'..that's the only choice. I didn't select it as I wasn't sure what it was going to do.

 

After reading through a few posts it seems like the Aomei Partition Assistant 5.1 might let me do what I want.

http://majorgeeks.com/Partition_Assistant_d6463.html

What I was thinking would be to expand my C drive to include the rest of the space available on the 250gb drive....

...unless there's some reason to possibly use that space as a new partition?

 

Mission Accomplished.

Wow. That was too easy, using the Partition Assistant. I just merged the unallocated space with drive C. Took about 10 seconds.

D is now 7.8gb
C is now 225gb.

:-D

 

Good work!

Thank you for letting us know what worked for you. I'm glad to know Aomei works.