Windows 7: Replacing a existing drive with a larger drive

Hello,

I have 4 - 250gb SATA drives on my Windows 7 machine. One has Windows 7, One has Vista (I dual boot) and the other two are used for storage. I want to replace one of the storage drives with a larger capacity drive 1TB.

In looking inside the cabinet I cant tell which drive has what on it.

Can I just unplug the cable on one drive at a time and identify it that way? Or would it create a problem, such as, Windows renaming the 3 remaining drives?

What's the best way to do this?

Thanks

Don

Enter BIOs setup and look at HD's to determine which HD is plugged into which port 0, 1, 2, 3.

If this isn't enough, type CMD into Start Search box, rightclick to run as Admin, type "Diskpart," , then "list disk"

Now copy down which drive is in which slot judging by size and content.

You can pull out them one by one to check what they are containing. The windows won't rename them.

You can look in Device Manager and see if the drives are identified by model number. Then select properties and volume and populate to see what is on each drive.



Jim

If all disks are the same size and are fully occupied with partitions, you will not be able to tell them apart because the free space will always be shown as zero. For that you have to use a little trick. Shrink a few MBs off a partition on each drive and leave it as unallocated space. If you use a different number of MBs per drive, you will be able to tell them apart because those shrunk MBs will show as free space. Example Disk1:

DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free
-------- ---------- ------- -------
Disk 0 Online 233 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 233 GB 1199 MB
Disk 2 Online 15 GB 0 B

Now you know which port serves which disk.

Thanks to everyone who replied. I appreciate you taking the time and sharing your knowledge.

Don