Tranfer all files from one hard drive to a new one, including OS?

Question

I need to tranfer all of my files from my current hard drive to my new hard drive, including the OS. I couldn't find out how to do this elsewhere and just need some help. I use windows 7 and my current hard drive is a 80GB SSD and my new one is a larger 500GB regular hard drive. Can this be done? Thanks!

Answer 1

The best way to do something like this would be to clone aka imaging your hard drive you can use a program such as clonezilla or driveimage to do this

Answer 2

SURE! What you NEED is a disk manager, or a partition manager program to make a DISK IMAGE of your current system onto an external disk such as a USB external drive. Then... Swap the drives out. Then you boot from the disk manager program disk and restore the image from the external USB drive to the new hard disk. THAT is exactly how I perform a system backup of my laptop before installing a new software package. If something goes wrong, I simply restore from my backup image and it is as if nothing happened at all. I have a 1TB USB external drive and my laptop internal disk is only 80GB, so I can place 12 separate backup images on the USB drive before I have to overwrite an older image. The USB drive is ONLY used when I make a backup image. I use Acronis backup software that boots and runs from a CD. This method has saved my system more times that I can count. Windoze UNINSTALL programs mostly do NOT work as advertised and leave all sorts of trash behind. By restoring from a backup image, NOTHING from a botched uninstall remains...



There IS a caveat! Windoze makes a hardware and software fingerprint when installed the first time. If you swap out a hard disk, it COULD be seen as a copyright violation because the hardware fingerprint has changed in a significant manner. This happened to me when I swapped out windoze XP Pro in a laptop with a failed hard disk. When I restored the disk image, I received a copyright violation notice. What I ended up doing was restoring to an identical make and model hard disk... which solved the violation thing. And then. just to be sure, I did a complete reinstall of XP to "upgrade" my existing system with my valid license code. And NOW, you know why I stopped riding the upgrade train with XP Pro on my two laptops and windoze 2000 Pro (server and workstation) on all of my other machines.

Answer 3

The best thing I can think of is creating an .iso of your drive but that copies how much space is free or used (which would render the extra from the 500 useless). .iso's are exact copies of discs/drives so it will be EXACTLY the same. I think there is an option to disable the space amount though.

Answer 4

You can clone the drive. Only thing is the drive your going to clone has to be larger, which in your case it is. You need a dual docking station that takes either SATA or IDE and a spare USB port, I got mine in eBay, not that expensive.

Answer 5

Use Acronis