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How to transfer one bootable hard drive to another.

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A friend of mine has a computer in her business with a dangerously full hard drive. All of her pertinant files are on her C drive. She has windows Vista Office or Business. The hard drive is an old IDE drive so I cant use a “cradle” to copy the hard drive to a larger hard drive and still have it boot.
Question: Can I use the “back up entire PC” button in the back-up feature of windows to send a copy to an external drive, install a new larger drive in her computer and install the same version of Vista on it to make it the bootable C drive, finally reinstall the complete PC back-up on the new drive and have it put all the files back in their origional positions and end up with a functional, bootable drive?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Topic

Clarifications

In reply to How to transfer one bootable hard drive to another.

Clarifications

Clone

In reply to How to transfer one bootable hard drive to another.

There are many cloning utilities out there including Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, and many others. Cloning will transfer the old to new, preserving all files and settings, and make the new disk bootable as well.

Another solution

In reply to How to transfer one bootable hard drive to another.

Install the new hard drive as a secondary. Change the jumper setting of the old HD as primary and the new hd as secondary. Then you can move the important data off the c drive and onto the d drive.

Can’t Be That Old

In reply to How to transfer one bootable hard drive to another.

If they are running Vista, this system cannot be that old.

Start by selecting the new hard drive. I presume that it will also be an IDE drive.
For this task, I would go with a Western Digital as they are licensing Acronis for their disk copy utility.

Download the latest version of disk utilities from the new drive manufacture.

Now, you have 2 options:
Slave the new drive onto the existing system temporarily.

Or, use 2 USB to IDE adapters.

I tend to use 2 USB drive adapters to avoid any problems with the new hard drive booting up as the D: or E: drive.

Use the drive manufactures utility to copy the old hard drive onto the new drive.

Install the new drive as single or primary master. All should be just fine.

For ANY business use with critical data, it is a good idea to have at least 2 physical hard drives in a system. Map My Documents and all programs to use the second hard drive for file storage. That way, when they need a larger drive, or move to a new computer it is a fairly easy task to move the data from the old computer to the new computer.

Chas

try this

In reply to How to transfer one bootable hard drive to another.

download and make acronics rescue media bootable cd
incert the bootable cd
and select acronics disk director suite safe vershion
There u can resize or copy u r c partion to a bigger sized partition

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