There are many reasons you might want to move to a new hard drive.  Perhaps your internal hard drive is starting to fail, or perhaps your replacing your internal hard drive because you need more storage space then your current one offers.  Whatever the reason, there’s some planning that goes into replacing any hard drive, or making any data migration.  Here are some Tech Tips to keep in mind if you’re planning on moving your digital life to a new hard drive.

Author Credit: Lincoln Spector

Joseph Blough Jr. plans to upgrade his hard drive. How does he move Windows, his applications, and his files to their new, larger home?

I’m not going to discuss the hardware issues of making sure your new drive is compatible or of physically installing it. See How to Install a New Hard Drive. If you have a laptop, read Mobile Computing: Upgrade Your Notebook’s Hard Drive, as well.

So let’s get on with copying everything from the old hard drive to the new one. You can’t just drag-and-drop copy the files, as that will miss your boot sector, important parts of Windows, and any hidden partitions. If your computer came with Windows installed, there’s a good chance that you’ve got a hidden partition that you’ll need on the new drive should you have to reinstall the OS.

There are two approaches here: Imaging and cloning. Imaging backs up everything on your hard drive to a single, very large file on a separate piece of media–usually an external hard drive. Cloning directly copies the contents of one drive onto another. I’m going to discuss cloning here because, for this particular job, it’s probably the better choice. See Should I Image the Hard Drive or Clone It? for more on these two approaches.

Cloning requires that your PC have access to both hard drives simultaneously. If you have a desktop, you can install the new one as a second internal drive (which will become the first one after you remove the older drive). If you have a laptop, or if you just don’t want to fiddle with

motherboard cables anymore than you have to, you can use a device like the BYTECC USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Adapter to turn your new internal hard drive into a temporary external one.

For cloning software, consider EASEUS Disk Copy. This free program downloads as a .iso image file, which you can use to create a bootable CD. (If double-clicking the .iso file doesn’t launch a disc-burning program, download and install the free ISO Recorder.) When you boot from the CD, it will take you into a simple wizard-driven cloning program. (My thanks to coastie65, a regular of the Answer Line forum, for pointing me in EASEUS’ direction.)

Disk Copy misses one important feature: You can’t resize the partitions–an odd omission since the whole point of upgrading your hard drive is to get a bigger one. Luckily, if you have Windows 7 or Vista, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. See Resize Your Partitions for instructions.

Read the rest of this article HERE at PC World online.

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