Windows 7: Hard drive replacement

I have actually never done a hard drive swap and a full restore. I was wondering if you all could help me out heres what i want to do.

I have a full entire backup of all files on my computer. (took like 6 hours to backup)
I want to take the 2 tb hard drive ive purchased and hook it up by sata and remove the old hard drive then restore my computer back to as if it were exactly the same without anything changing.
Questions,
1. )do i have to backup my registry in a different way than windows 7 backup utility.
2. )will i lose any data throughout the process and will all applications including games and everything on the drive function correctly?


*note i am not changing any other hardware in the machine just simply swapping the hard drives.*

thanks, let me know what i need to do to make this happen

You say you have a "full entire backup".

What do you mean?

An image of your C partition?

A file by file backup of all files on the C partition?

Something else?

You don't have to separately backup the registry.

What application are you using to make this "full entire backup"??

Whether you will lose data or need to reinstall applications depends on exactly what you are doing and we don't have enough info at this point.

I just used the windows 7 backup utility for c: and made an image of c: correct.

That is correct.

This tutorial will help: System Image Recovery

You will be fine as is , just place the image on the new drive

so would i reformat install windows then restore the image to the drive after installing?

You can format drive , then just install the image you made from windows 7 , then install this drive as primary drive , power up and continue on with day as if nothing happened

First: is the OLD hard drive an IDE connected drive or SATA also? There could be some additional precautions to take if this is so, but we can cover that later.

You can connect the new SATA drive while the old drive is still connected. Boot into windows (from the old drive) and you can do all your prep of the new drive from within Windows using the Disk Management tool. Create your partition(s), format it (them) NTFS, and for the partition that will eventually be C: you can "mark it as Active".

Now, without restarting or shutting down, Install your image onto that first, active, partition on the new hard drive. A disk image is a sector by sector "snapshot" of everything on the partition that is imaged.

Now shut down the computer, disconnect the old drive, leave the new drive connected, and restart. If you have done everything right you will boot into Windows as if nothing happened as diehrd said.

But please review that tutorial beforehand. It covers a lot of this in much more detail.

If the image does not work, you can always disconnect the new hard drive and reconnect the old and try again.