Migrating to a bigger hard drive

thanks to all!

Your advice has been invaluable. I downloaded the WD tool, which is actually Acronis :)

I tried to clone several times, but to no avail, it seems there were errors and so it just asked to reboot.

The 500gb disk is a WD green power drive, and so I have ordered a new Caviar Black drive and will go through the process again, using the greenpower as an extra storage disk as I have been.

I just feel that a Velociraptor drive can be put to better use than just doing email / web and word!

Hi there
For a ONE OFF type of solution such as this then Windows backup etc *could* be OK.

However if you have a lot of USER data on your machine (I have scanned invoices and quite a few business documents of various sorts to say nothing of e-books etc) then I think you really need a professional backup solution.

Programs such as Acronis can do "Incremental and Differential backups" selective file / directory restore can schedule backups automatically, can span media etc etc. so it's easy to say backup on Mondays email, new scanned invoices etc, on Tuesdays say MySQL DB data and so on.

The small extra cost of this software for home users is WELL WORTH THE MONEY --often around only 45 USD or so.

Most people unfortunately only realize the value of backups after they've broken their mp3 player, lost their music, or had a hard disk failure which while rare DOES happen especially with those USB small disks thqt people carry around with them a lot --they aren't the most rugged piece of equipment out there.

There's nothing like losing a load of important data to make you realize that backing up a system should be done REGULARLY.

OK this is slightly different to what the OP had in mind but it is still important to do it regularly.

Cheers
jimbo