Copying All Data to New Drive

[Mike521]

Hey all, I purchased a new 80gig drive today. I currently have an 80gig as my main drive. I'd like to make the new drive be the main drive, and use my current one as a secondary drive

So I need to make an exact copy of the current drive, and move it all to the new drive. I don't feel like reinstalling windows and starting over, I just want to move all the data to the new drive

anyone know how to go about doing this? I need to get the registry, all program settings, etc..

Do I need to copy everything to dvds? or can I install the new drive as a secondary drive, run some sort of program to move everything over, and then reboot or something?

Thanks in advance

 

[Trap05]

Norton Ghost

 

[leojharris]

Do I need to copy everything to dvds? or can I install the new drive as a secondary drive, run some sort of program to move everything over, and then reboot or something?

Thanks in advance

the above mentioned apps work well; however ... you can do the same thing without spending any money.

for a totally free and totally rock solid (in my experience) drive imaging application ... look no further than DriveImage XML.

it's completely free at runtime software's website: http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

for your purposes ... you'll want to do a direct 1 to 1 copy of your old drive to your new drive and then simply change the drive boot order. you can also use it with a windows PE bootable XP cdrom image to do disaster recovery.

here's info on windows PE: http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm

very neat software ... exact block by block copy of your drive ... boot sector, data files, everything.

i just now (literally) restored a 1 day old complete system image because i screwed up my services that were running in WinXP and my boot time increased by about 30 secons. i couldn't remember which services i disabled and so simply restored from the drive image. did a complete 40 gig image in about 20 minutes. windows XP booted up fine. i use it instead of windows restore cause i don't like the overhead of the windows restore service.

 

[tuskenraider]

You can download the manufacturer's drive tools of whatever brand hard drive you bought and use the "disk copy" feature that they all contain.

 

[Mike521]

thanks for all the suggestions! free route sounds best to me

 

[RangerXLT8]

You can download the manufacturer's drive tools of whatever brand hard drive you bought and use the "disk copy" feature that they all contain.

Yep Maxtor and WD have them that I have used. It copies the entire drive, boot sector ect. Very easy.

 

[Mike521]

Yep Maxtor and WD have them that I have used. It copies the entire drive, boot sector ect. Very easy.

For Western Digital, is it that data lifeguard thing? I thought that was just for "securing your data" or something, but now that I look at their description on the website, it seems like it can be used for copying data also?

note that acronis offers a 15 day free trial.

well in that case I'll check this out too, I only need it for 1 day anyway

so looks like I have a bunch of options that will all work perfectly

 

[tuskenraider]

Yep, just use the DataLifeGuard program as it's the simplest solution.