Windows 7: Moving W7 to a new hard drive

I tried searching for this but I'm still confused. I built my first PC recently and it's working fine but I've decided I want a faster hard drive. If I want to carry on using the same OS rather than buy a new one, and want to keep all my programs and files etc would this method work?

Buy new hard drive



Connect new hard drive

Follow instructions here and set the save location as the new hard drive

Unplug old drive and turn PC on with only new drive connected

Would the new drive have all the needed system files to work on it's own? I don't want to have to buy another copy of Windows 7.

Thanks for any help.

Imaging products like Acronis have a couple of capabilities:

1: making and saving an image of a drive, usually to another hard drive. Then "restoring" that image if and when the original hard drive installation has major issues. Think of this as making a copy of your system and later placing that copy back on a hard drive. This is usually done to recover from disasters, like a failed hard drive or accidental deletion of important files.

2: "Cloning". This is copying a system on one hard drive to another hard drive in real time. You don't save an image and later restore it. This is normally done when things are working well, but you just want to move to a faster or larger drive.

If I understand you correctly, you would want to use the second method. Acronis can do that and I think the other standard imaging applications can do it as well.

In your case, you would connect the new drive and then "clone" from the old drive to the new drive.

The backup stuff that's part of Windows 7 won't work then?

And is this what you're talking about?

Acronis backup software and recovery services in UK. Complete hard disk drive copy, cloning and image backup software: computer files and disk copying

Do you know if the free trial version is suitable for what I want? (the cloning you mentioned does sound like what I want to do). Thanks for the help.

You can also use Windows backup to create an image then restore that to the new drive. Windows is different from Acronis in that it will restore exactly what you had before as far as partition sizes, but you can use the Disk Management to change that later.

The backup capabilities built into Windows 7 do NOT include cloning as far as I know.

Yes, Acronis True Image 2010 is one of the suitable products for cloning.

You may not have to pay for it. I think you can get a free 30 day trial that you can use for 30 days directly from Acronis. As far as I know, the trial version does not have any restrictions?

If you plan to clone or restore to a Western Digital drive, you can download a free copy of Acronis from Western Digital.

I think you can also download a free copy from Seagate if you are cloning or restoring to a Seagate drive.

Note: the catch is the brand you are cloning or restoring TO, not the brand you are cloning or restoring FROM.

These Western Digital and Seagate versions do not have any time restrictions like the 30 day trial.

Imaging (rather than cloning) would work also, but is a bit more complicated. You would have to make an image and then restore it to the new drive.

If you choose to image rather than restore, you have to have a location to store that saved image and it can't be your C partition.

Does you original hard drive that now has your C partition also have another partition, or at least enough empty space for another partition?? If so, you could place the image on the new partition, and then restore from that new partition to the new drive.

You can download the 30 day Acronis trial here:


http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing...cts/trueimage/

Scroll halfway down the page.

Ah, I haven't picked a hard drive yet but it might well be Western Digital or Seagate so that would be a great help.

I have another partition and space for yet another, but cloning sounds like a better option.

Thanks very much for the help, that was exactly what I wanted to know

Raptor:

Here is a paste from the Acronis site:

What is the difference between creating an image with Acronis True Image 2010 and using the embedded "Disk Clone" tool?

The "Backup" wizard of Acronis True Image 2010 creates an image file for backup and disaster recovery purposes, while the "Disk Clone" tool simply copies/moves the entire contents of one hard disk drive to another. Here's how both tools work and when you should use them.

When you create an image with Acronis True Image 2010, you get an exact copy of your hard disk, a disk partition or individual files or folders (you make this choice when you create the image archive). If you choose to back up a hard disk drive or a partition, then every portion of the hard disk that has data written to it (sectors) is saved into a compressed file — or multiple files if you prefer. You can save this image to any supported storage device and use it as a backup or for disaster recovery. (Note: if Acronis True Image cannot identify the file system, it creates a sector-by-sector image of the disk. This image is not compressed and the image file will be the same size as the disk being imaged.)

When you use the "Disk Clone" tool, you effectively copy/move all of the contents of one hard disk drive onto another hard disk drive. This function allows you to transfer all the information (including the operating system and installed programs) from a small hard disk drive to a large one without having to reinstall and reconfigure all of your software. The migration takes minutes, not hours, but it is not generally used as a backup strategy.

Yes, the Windows Backup Imaging is flawless. I save the image of any/all partitions to aprimary Recovery Partition on each my machines, then backup to external drive in case of HDD failure.

It takes about 15 minutes to reimage the HDD or another from the installer disk repair console. I see no difference with Acronis except the Windows version is built in and can run on a schedule or update up your image and selected files in the background while computer is idle. Just leave your external plugged in.

Hi there
Acronis will allow you to re-size the image on restore and you can specify the size as well. - so if you want to restore to 70 GB instead of 40GB you just specify that in the restore.
Note you get the extra space by deleting an existing partition or using "unpartitioned" space. You can do this in the Acronis program without needing another product. (Ensure if you delete another partition to create more space you've backed up any data in it first).

Cheers
jimbo

I've used Seagates DiscWizard (Acronis) and it works very well. I cloned a new hard drive and there was no issues. It's pretty fast also.
It will clone and backup to different sized partitions, easy, no need to re-size, change or do it later.
Definitely recommended.

Have used it for backups, tested it several times and never had a failure. Reports from other Acronis users are all good. It is highly recommended.