migrating hard disks

[iwasinnamuknow]

Hi guys,

I've got a windows 7 x64 machine and I need to migrate it to another hard disk. Currently its running on an old 160GB IDE (i know....) and I want to migrate the install to a pair of 500GB WD SATA2 drives.

I know how to mirror the disks, but I need to find a way to migrate without a re-install. It's a long time since I did anything like this on windows (It's so easy on other OSs).

Ideally I'd like to partition the new disk (say, 40GB) and migrate the current system to that. Then add the second disk and mirror it, create the second partition etc.

So...what are the recommended ways to migrate a system to a new disk?

Any tips appreciated.

Thanks

 

[stormy13]

Install both drives first so that Windows can detect and install the necessary drivers for them. Then it should just be a matter of using this,

WD Support

to migrate the Windows install to the new drives.

One small thing, if the current Windows install is on a partition larger then 40 GB then it may not work. You can usually go from a smaller drive/partition to a larger when migrating, but usually not from larger to smaller.

 

[iwasinnamuknow]

Install both drives first so that Windows can detect and install the necessary drivers for them. Then it should just be a matter of using this,

WD Support

to migrate the Windows install to the new drives.

One small thing, if the current Windows install is on a partition larger then 40 GB then it may not work. You can usually go from a smaller drive/partition to a larger when migrating, but usually not from larger to smaller.

Thanks for the reply. I'll take a look at that link in a second.

I come from a unix world and I was under the impression that it could be done 2 ways: A filesystem level copy or a block level copy. If it's a fs level copy then I should be able to copy to a smaller partition (as long as there's room of course). With a block level copy then I would end up with an exact replica (partition size and everything). Is this all moot for windows?

 

[iwasinnamuknow]

That link looks good. Reminds me of the old Symantec Ghost toolset. Looks like it will do a block-level copy though, so it'll have to sit with a 160GB primary partition. Could be worse.

Thanks

 

[Mike Connor]

You can use this;

Best free data backup software. Hard drive backup and recovery freeware. Hard Disk image freeware.

The workstation edition will also do a "universal restore", ( Restore to different hardware).



Regards....Mike Connor