PC installing OS question

October 9, 2007 10:18 AM

PC/installing OS/Disk drive question: Here's what I have: XP sp2 & my software on a 20Gb HDD. All my documents etc are on a separate drive. I want to move my OS and Program Files to a new 120Gb HDD. If I just copy the lot over and change the boot dir as it boots, will all my programs still be installed? Could I change the 120Gb HDD's name to C: while I'm partitioning it prior to copying the OS etc over if that would mean that the software wouldn't need reinstalling? I hope this is clear...
posted by criticalbill to computers & internet (5 comments total)

If you copy the contents of the old drive onto the new one and then boot from the new one (with the old one removed) the effect should be seamless. That is to say, if you haven't changed any other hardware (mobo, memory, etc.) harddrives are typically something that can be upgraded without major settings changes. I would boot up from a LiveCD like UBCD4Win or BartPE with both harddrives hooked up and do a full clone from one to the other, then remove old and reboot.
posted by genial at 10:24 AM on October 9, 2007

By "copy"... do you mean just a simple file-copy?.... or do you mean ghosting/cloning the 20gig drive to the 120gig drive?

If you mean just simple file-copy.. then "NO"... that wont work. OS and program files cant just be simply file-copied, you need to use some kind of drive imaging program like Ghost.

Here is how I would do it:
1.) remove all hard drives from computer
2.) install 120gig as Master drive (so that it becomes C:), and format, install your OS and Programs,etc
3.) Install the old 20gig drive as Slave (so that it becomes D: )... and manually copy over any files/data that you need to the C:\
4.) unplug the 20gig and set it aside, keeping it until you are sure you didnt miss anything.

Is that the "harder" way to do it?.. YES, it is.. but doing it this way also assures you have a nice clean fresh install that will be reliable. You can always just use a drive imaging program and clone the 20gig to the 120 gig, that should work fine too. I prefer the 4 step method above for the reasons I mentioned.
posted by jmnugent at 10:31 AM on October 9, 2007

If you don't want to lose your OS you already have installed and are going to keep the computer and just change the hard drive, use a program like Acronis TrueImage or DriveImage XML to image the drive to another computer, then plug in the new drive and restore the image to it.
Simply copying files will not a proper copy make. The drive will not know how to boot up, you must use an imaging program like this.
posted by ijoyner at 11:11 AM on October 9, 2007

Oh, and you may need one of these to plug the drives into another computer.
posted by ijoyner at 11:12 AM on October 9, 2007

Sorry, I didn't clarify that but I meant "clone" not a simple copy/paste. I usually use ghost for this but there are many options. I would do the simple clone instead of the full install but I'm lazy and that's your call. Either way keep the old drive as jmnugent mentioned so you have a backup if anything should go wrong (but really in the world of hardware upgrades a harddrive is the simplest of them all)
posted by genial at 6:00 PM on October 9, 2007