Software. How Do I Transfer All The Files And Programs From The Old Hdisk To A New One?

Software : How Do I Transfer All The Files And Programs From The Old Hdisk To A New One

I am planning to replace my old hard disk to a bigger capacity, how will I transfer all my files and programs from the old HDisk to a new one without affecting the license of my OS (WinXPSP2) and all the files and programs? And then format the old hard disk and make it another drive. ~~~ un2nu ~~~

Best Answer To Software Question

Either get an external hard drive and put all your files on them, or put them all on a bunch of CDs or DVDs. DVDs would be a better options since they can hold about GB, as opposed a CD which only holds 700 MB. If you have a DVD drive that can burn Dual Layer DVDs, that would be even better (they hold about 8 GB). Really the easiest solution, though, is to drag the entire contents of your C: drive to an external hard drive and then import your old files to your new drive. To format it, just do this. Lets say your old hard drive is C:, and after installing your new one, your new one is D:. Put in your XP install CD and go into Recovery Console. Type this: format C: /fs:ntfs /q Hit enter. When its done type exit and hit enter. Your computer will restart. Take your install CD out. Your old hard drive should show up as an empty partition now.

All Answer To Software Questions

Answer 1

You just cant transfer all your programs and settings to another disk of a bigger capacity. You can do a ghost image on a disk of equal capacity. Norton Ghost is good. It would be better if you keep the old disk as the system disk and use the new hard disk as a storage disk.

Answer 2

Either get an external hard drive and put all your files on them, or put them all on a bunch of CDs or DVDs. DVDs would be a better options since they can hold about GB, as opposed a CD which only holds 700 MB. If you have a DVD drive that can burn Dual Layer DVDs, that would be even better (they hold about 8 GB). Really the easiest solution, though, is to drag the entire contents of your C: drive to an external hard drive and then import your old files to your new drive. To format it, just do this. Lets say your old hard drive is C:, and after installing your new one, your new one is D:. Put in your XP install CD and go into Recovery Console. Type this: format C: /fs:ntfs /q Hit enter. When its done type exit and hit enter. Your computer will restart. Take your install CD out. Your old hard drive should show up as an empty partition now.

Answer 3

Your new Hard disk shoud of come with software to this. It just clones the old dirve

Answer 4

Steve K is right...many times if you buy the retail version of a drive you get a cd with tools to migrate stuff from one disk to another. Ive used ghost 2003 for years almost exclusively...so I really havent tried other methods...and if I have none of them made an impression on me or I did not find them any more helpful. But one of the other posters is wrong...you can transfer one disk to another...regardless of size, the vast majority of the the time. That is, you can transfer from a bigger driver to a smaller one, a smaller one to a bigger one, or from drives that are the same size. I personally do not prefer to transfer drives that are the same size...because it is really easy to screw up. When transfering, the only requirement is that the target drive has to be bigger than the data size of the original (pretty obvious). I fix computers for a living..and have cloned close to 1,000 different drives because I back up the machines before I work on them. The vast majority of times there are no hitches...most problems are caused by one of the drives having bad sectors that sometimes must be addressed before transfer. Sometimes the only way to transfer is by doing a sector by sector copy, which means you cant go from a larger drive to a smaller one. This is rare, but it can happen. Again...my experience is with Ghost, but a search on the net can yield other options. Im just about to purchase Acronis Workstation for Vista cloning...and if you go to Acronis website youll see they have other products to do exactly what you want. I think their Migrate product is just what you need and I think its the cheapest. But again...if you buy a retail drive as opposed to oem it may come with migration tools. You can also go to the manufacturers website and download the tools from there. Done that for Seatools and Powermax (seagate and maxtor) recently, but I dont remember offhand if these tools also have a migration component to them. Again, I have a system for using Ghost 2003 which works well for me, so I dont have that much of a compelling need to screw around with other methods. Remember, this is for disk-to-disk cloning to the same computer. Doing it to put it into another computer is not necessarily as simple. Good luck Don