Hard Drive Swap??

[familyman1]

Hey all,
My father-in-law has a 10yr old desktop that is in desperate need of a higher capacity hard drive to hold all of the business info for our family business. The present configuration is two ide drives that are full. When we get a bigger drive , what is the best way to transfer the info over to the new drive? Would a disc image be the answer? I just don't want to lose any of the info!!

 

[eyeCpc]

The best and smart move is seeing a clean install of the OS on the new larger capacity drive and simply copying data over from the older small ones. A great deal will depend on which version of Windows or other OS is presently in use. 98? ME? 2000? XP? XP SP1 required for any size over 137gb to avoid the need to multi partition a new larger capacity drive.

 

[Ronspc]

Or you could just simply get a External hard drive they get as big as 2 terabytes. So all you would have to do is plug it in to a USB jack and wah lah your good n gravy. Then all you would have to do is drag n drop all those files off the hard drives into the external. The best part about it is. Then you could just take the external with you wherever you needed to go and you would have your documents with you at all times.

 

[eyeCpc]

I'm waiting for the usb flash drives to grow in capacity there as well as some lower price tags on those! Try about $160- for a 64gb.

On a 10yr. old system you are likely seeing usb 1.1 while all the newer usb external drives and devices require 2.0! Even with XP being run the bus on the old system there wouldn't be too kind to external especially the most commonly seen sata drives.

At least you can still get into a 500gb ide the largest those go. You then have the option of using the present drives the way they are and dedicate the new large capacity drive as the spill over for long term storage.

Another option besides the larger drive would be a backup program depending again on the version of Windows or OS being run.

 

[familyman1]

We are running xp sp3. I think the clean install is a good idea. The os seems a little shady right now anyway. I went to do a backup and the backup utility in xp is not showing up, so a clean install is in order. What would be the best way to backup files with the xp backup missing?