Windows 7 - Wanting to Upgrade Harddrives without Reformatting

I have a slow aging 160gb drive and I want to upgrade to a new drive WITHOUT reinstalling and starting over from scratch.


No one wants to go back from the beginning to reconfigure. The PC is quite problem free, with all the latest updates of Windows and all installed softwares. It has no viruses/spywares or unwanted programs or files present so there's no reason to reformat.


I want to copy ALL the files from the old slow drive to the new fast drive and on the software side minimal changes. Is it possible to do this legitimately?



It's running on Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit.

No that's not possible. I don't see why you wouldn't want to reformat. Starting fresh knowing everything is clean and fast is awesome.

You can image the old HD Drive & Restore to the New HD Drive.

Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup
System Image Recovery

You can always clone the drive over. Doing a fresh install isn't something to be afraid of. With a little planning, it can take under 2 hours. But in this case, there's no reason to avoid cloning to start.

I did this on Friday from a 60gb SSD to a 128gb SSD. I used CloneZilla (Clonezilla - About). All you need to do is hook both HDD's up to the computer and then burn clonezilla to a CD/DVD and boot up the PC using it. Then just follow the on screen instructions. Took about 10 minutes for me to copy the data and be back up and running.

Hope that helps

So there isn't any transfer kits similar to the Xbox 360 and it's hard drives?

You could use:
PARAGON Software Group - partitioning, drive backup, hard disk maintenance

If one of the drives is a Seagate or Western Digital, you can get free backups software that will clone your driver from their support sites. Both us e a OEM variant of True Image Home. You just tell it to clone the old drive to the new drive, reboot and it clones it, then pull the old drive out and reboot. Works great.

Good luck.

Thanks. I just wish the PC wasn't so complicated. Cloning doesn't sound legit or safe, but i don't think i'm going to be doing it anyways. Maybe i'll ask someone to do it professionally.

It definitely isn't complicated, and there's nothing illegit or unsafe about it. It's completely legal and legit, and your source drive isn't touched, just in case something goes wrong...you can always start over.

If you really had an allergy to cloning, it is shocking you'd rather pay someone to do the simple task of cloning, then do a clean install yourself. Cloning the drive is much faster and easier than doing a fresh install.