hard drive cloning

[mikee]

I have a 120GB drive for my windows and programs and it is getting full only about 4gb left and worse it's IDE meaning very slow speed. I was wondering if I bought a 500Gb drive for my windows and programs is there an easy way to just clone the 120gb drive to a 500gb drive exactly as is and boot into windows exactly as it is on this drive?

 

[iPwn]

I have a 120GB drive for my windows and programs and it is getting full only about 4gb left and worse it's IDE meaning very slow speed. I was wondering if I bought a 500Gb drive for my windows and programs is there an easy way to just clone the 120gb drive to a 500gb drive exactly as is and boot into windows exactly as it is on this drive?

Plug in the harddrive and then do the following command in a DOS prompt:

xcopy32 c:\ d:\ /h/i/c/k/e/r/y

Assuming D: is now the 500GB harddrive.

 

[mikee]

D is my 1.5TB it will likely come up as E or F but that won't affect this command will it? Just change the letters to E or F where it says D?

And this will allow me to boot the existing windows install but on the new drive?

 

[iPwn]

D is my 1.5TB it will likely come up as E or F but that won't affect this command will it? Just change the letters to E or F where it says D?

Correct.

And this will allow me to boot the existing windows install but on the new drive?

It should, yes, BUT there may be an issue with Windows recognizing that it's on a new harddrive. Usually Windows allows you to make three or so hardware changes before it freaks out so you should be okay, can't guarantee it though.

 

[mikee]

I have added ram in the past year so there's 1 change and a hard drive would be change 2. I hope it doesn't give me heck because I got this copy of windows on connect last august downloaded from microsoft so I don't exactly have a box with a key on it to look at If I do have to call MS and get it sorted out. I did write the key down somewhere but I'll have to look for it prior to doing the drive swap since I have it saved in a file and print it out.

 

[iPwn]

Even if the drive swap fails, the original harddrive will still boot up since that installation of Windows didn't 'detect' the new harddrive. And when I say changes to the system, swapping ram == 1 change, but I don't know if they're cumulative. So if you were to upgrade the harddrive, I don't know if that's 2 or reset to one, I know that if you were to swap out three components all at the same time, Windows goes nuts.

 

[mikee]

I did have an issue once like you described I put a random old hard drive I had laying around into the crappy kennel office rig and it turned out it had vista on it from another computer which had a pentium and the office rig had an athlon xp. Man did that ever go nuts for about an hour with found new hardware windows and activation notifications. Basically it had the computer form of tourretts.