Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: win7, harddrive, replace | Themes: Windows Tech Talk, Desktop Computers
5. Method No. 1: Start Fresh with No Backup
The easiest way to get your machine up and running is to start from scratch with a new operating system, but you’ll need to recreate your digital life on the new drive. It’s a perfect method if you have an old system, cluttered with software you don’t use or that acts weird. On the other hand, it can take hours to reload everything.
With the machine turned off, unplug and take the old hard drive out, replace it with the new one, and plug it in. With the operating system CD that came with the computer in the optical drive, restart the PC. If you’ve lost the disc, contact the company that sold you the computer. Chances are that it’ll send you new discs or you can create your own.
You’ll need to boot from the CD drive, which for most PCs involves hitting F12 while the system is starting. The CD brings up the Windows installation interface. Click on Install and follow the step by step procedure to format the drive and install the operating system. Make sure you have the license code for the operating system handy because you’ll need it to get the software to load. It generally takes about 45 minutes to install Windows XP or Vista, so use this time to find all the CDs (and license codes) for all your programs. You’ll need them.
Once everything is set up and running, you can lift what you need from the old drive by setting it up as an external drive (See page nine) 
- Previous page The Second Drive
- Next page Pre-Transfer Work
If you clone for the first time, it 's a good idea to have an extra backup somewhere in case you goof up and end up with two blank drives.
Acronis True Image is a great program for cloning drives and backing up to an image.
people should just suck it up and get a TB hard drive if there worried or complaining about space. the green edition of the Western digital 1TB hard drive can be had for 100 bucks or less
Can't go wrong with ghosting it. However most times I just log into administrator account and copy the entire user folder onto an external drive then reformat. Keeping previously installed software such as games and applications doesn't serve much purpose but sometimes there can be save games there. Most often people won't be saving their word documents within the microsoft office folder under program files. But I can understand people wanting to save their quicken databases and such from there too so ghosting can be a good route to go and you can restore it later.
Normally at home I just put a new drive in and do a fresh install and then whatever I need from the previous installation I can just retrieve by plugging the drive into an external bay. The thing that takes me the most time is reconfiguring steam because rather than re-downloading everything I like to set steam set up then copy all my data files back over from the previous drive to the new location. Seems to work for the most part, last time I just had trouble getting TF2 up but eventually I recopied it and it worked fine.
Isn't one of the key selling points of W7 is low HDD usage?
Article Fail
Isn't one of the key selling points of W7 is low HDD usage?Article Fail
Yes, but it still takes up *some* space--space which many people may not have. Why would upgrading to Windows 7 be a bad time to upgrade your hard drive?
Pretty great article.. almost forgot that tom's is a place for beginners AS MUCH as it is a place for enthusiasts.
I kinda wish the "Get The Right Drive" section had spent a little more time exploring the benefits of a 10000rpm drive or any time on ssd drives. I'm considering getting a new drive for my upgrade and that's the first thing I started to consider, so even if the recommendation is to forego raptors or ssds, it wouldn't have left a hole in the article that had me wondering.
Otherwise a great article! Just my 2 cents.
If you don't run millions of I/O's per second with extremely hard drive intensive programs, then 2x 640GB WD Caviar Black Raid 0 is enough, ssd/raptor is overkill.
To clone a hd, you can check this also...
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/sho [...] did=149328
I have an older PC with HD memory poroblems and I do indeed need to upgrade the HD. Problem is the O/S I am running is Win XP and it's so old I have lost the master CD. As it's a PC I built myself, years ago, I have no place to go to get another copy.
Any thoughts on the best way I should proceed? Is it possible to buy a "new" copy of W XP for the new HD, or should I SPEND MONEY to get a whole new copy of W 7? Wwhich I supect would be very expensive and defeat the whole project?
Most HDs either come with formatting/partitioning and copying software, or it can be down loaded from the HD mfr's website. Is after-mkt software really needed? Maybe more convenient/faster/versatile, but not cheaper.
If you ever plan on getting rid of the drive to a friend don't forget to do a government wipe on it. Crap Cleaner is a good free tool to do this, makes sure no personal information is on the drive. It can also clean up your registry and other things as well.
My Win7 copy fitted perfectly on a 6GB space!
I'm actually thinking about purchasing a 32GB SSD, and keep the dnld's for the ext. HD!
Sure, you could spend $70 on a 320GB drive. Or you could spend $80 on a 1TB drive with a docking station: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Comb [...] mbo.269819
I have unplugged my hard drive to check the connections but now computer has crashed. What do I so now?!?