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Dell Laptop HD Swap

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by babolatt16

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I am currently planning on replacing a 100GB hard drive in my Dell Inspiron with another hard drive for increased capacity. I wish to keep all of the information and settings intact and do as little re-installation of software as possible. How should I go about doing this?

I would perfer to create an image of the original HD with symmantec ghost, (or another ghosting software,) and deploy the image on the new HD. The only hardware change is a new harddrive, but would that still be enough to cause a hardware compatibility problem?

Else, I see my other option to be using the User State Migration Tool, which I would perfer not to do considering many of the programs/files still must be transfered manually.

So again, my question remains: Would ghosting (or imaging the HD) work or do I have to use USMT? Or, is there another, faster option I did not consider?

Thank you for the help!

4 replies

by rkuhn040172

Virtually all hard drive manufacturers offer free hard drive to hard drive transfer programs.

I have used Maxtor's several times and it works great.

Trick is, the laptop. Their software is really built for PC's where both drives can be installed at the same time.

Buy a $15 converter to take your new laptop hard drive and convert it to an external USB drive.

Then run the manufacturer software.

by Former member

Any cloning software like Acronis or Ghost will do just fine, but PLEASE make sure you do a backup first.

Please post back if you have anymore problems or questions.

by oh smeg

Can take the drive that you intend buying for it. If it's an older NB it is likely to have a IDE HDD and these have a upper limit in BIOS so if you exceed the BIOS Upper Limit it will not be recognized by the BIOS.

As for cloning software all that is required is to make a Clone of the Drive to the New one using all of the available space and that's it. However if the Dell has a Recovery Partition on the drive you'll loose this but that's not such a bad idea anyway as if this is used you trash all your Data and any extra Software that has been installed since the NB was originally Loaded.

Col

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