HDD cloning

[mikee]

My primary hard drive ( the small one in my sig) Is running out of space and is very old now and is IDE. What I am wondering is is there a way to clone all the contents of this drive to a new one exactly the way they are so that I can boot my existing windows installation off the new drive and do this for free. I really don't want to reinstall windows and all my programs That would be a pain.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

There's DriveClone, it's shareware but unfortunately you'd have to buy the full version to unlock most of the useful features.

 

[mikee]

This may sound stupid but I figure you cant just install the new drive and do a simple copy and past of all the current drive to the new drive and have that work can you?

 

[Celegorm]

This may sound stupid but I figure you cant just install the new drive and do a simple copy and past of all the current drive to the new drive and have that work can you?

I wish, but no. Just copying over doesn't create the partitions properly and link them up. Check out clonezilla Clonezilla - About. I've never used it, but I've heard others recommended it.

 

[Atomic Rooster]

Many drive manufacturers have software on their website that will copy the entire contents of the old drive to the new drive.

 

[mikee]

is this pertaining to the old drive or new drive manufacturers website? what I mean is my old hdd currently is western digital and the new one will be when I get it a different brand maybe are you saying go to the old drives website to get software to move contents of it to a new drive or go to the new drives website to get software to copy to the new drive.

Also just realized something I left all the extra cables for my modular psu at home including my extra sata one