Hard Drive cut and paste

Okay, here's the deal... been using a 80 Gig IDE, was just given a 120 Gig IDE. I've filled about 50 Gigs of my first HDD and I'm not one to use two harddrives... But what I want to do now is get my OS and all files on the 120, and throw all my media onto the 80. Is there any kind of program that I can copy everything from one HDD to the other and then reformat the 80 Gigger? I really don't want to reinstall all my programs. Any FREE programs that can do this? Also, I want the OS to be on a single 120 Gig partition, not an 80.

My 120 is a Seagate and came with a disc that contained DiscWizard and Bounceback Express. I used discwiz to copy the C (80) to the new one (120), but I would assume it did not change the MBR and maybe some reg keys, etc. not really my specialty so I dunno. Can anyone enlighten me on the logistics of the differences between copying files, mbr, and general non-Windows files used to get a booting computer to Windows? Would using that Bounceback Express thing help?

windows willnot let you simply drag and drop the system to another hard drive. Programs such as norton ghost will do the trick. There is also a techs best friend called The ultimate boot CD. That has quite a few apps on that to duplicate a system to another hard drive. Give it a try. and if it doesnt work out, atleast your ready when you need the other apps.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

I use discwizard and if you select to be able to boot from it and copy your current drive it is a 100% exact copy.

Okay then...

In an effort to not get too technical, I will try Quailane's suggestion first... but if I do that exact copy, I'm pretty sure it will be an 80 Gig partition on the HDD, which isn't really what I want. Is there a tool that will allow me to change this 80 Gig partition to the entire disk (120) after copying?

i'm pretty sure you can't change the partition size without remaking it.

ShauNotDeaD said:

In an effort to not get too technical, I will try Quailane's suggestion first... but if I do that exact copy, I'm pretty sure it will be an 80 Gig partition on the HDD, which isn't really what I want. Is there a tool that will allow me to change this 80 Gig partition to the entire disk (120) after copying?

Click to expand...

No. I have used it to copy an 80gig drive onto a new 160gig drive and it was an exact copy to boot off of and the partition was 160gigs.

W00t

Worked perfectly, thnx!

2 weird things happend so i havent wiped my old HDD yet: first time i tried to delete a file, it told me that recycle bin was corrupt and it will be emptied... worked since then.... second, zonealarm now had it allow/disallow program log cleared so i havta reallow everything internet access as progs ask for it.... could these be a sign of a bigger problem?

Probably not. There are sometimes little quirks like that but I have not had any problems.