How to transfer operating system to another drive

Hi all,

I recently purchased a new PC and it came with a 500GB main Hard Drive. I have a spare 750GB hard drive and want to install it as my master drive.

Just wondering, how do I transfer my files to the 750GB hard drive, set it as the master drive and then switch the current master drive to a slave drive for running just the operating system from?

Really confuses me atm but I'm a quick learner!

Thanks,

Jon

Have you run out of space on the 500gb drive, or is the 750gb a newer/faster drive?

I'd be looking at reinstalling, as if I've managed to fill a 500gb drive with programs then there is likely stuff on there I don't really need/want & is likely to be slowing the machine down. My aging Vista x64 install still only occupies 125gb on two 150gb Raptors in RAID0, and it is well past needing to be reformatted.

If it is general storage that has filled the 500gb drive, then it is simply worth moving the storage off to the 750gb drive. This is unless the 750gb is sufficiently faster to make it worth the effort of reinstalling.

If you are dead set in moving your existing operating system (as it is currently installed) onto the 750gb, then you will need to take an image of the hard drive and then put that image onto the 750gb drive, expanding it so it takes up the full size of the drive. Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image and others are capable of doing this.

I see I see.

It's not full at all it's just the 750GB is a 6GB/s hard drive whereas the current one is around 3GB/s I believe. I just want the OS and the files seperate really xD

So could I transfer all the files except for the OS from the current to the new hard drive, make the new hard drive master, old slave and then it would run fine from there or am I missing some steps?

You could, but that is the quickest way to break an operating system ;)

The imaging process I mentioned is roughly what you are discribing but takes into account the boot records and other hidden files crucial to making the operating system work. You'd need one of the software packages I mentioned to do this.

BTW - Master & Slave drives fell out of relevance with SATA - there is only one drive per channel, so they are all masters.

Ah right I see thats useful. Could it be worth me just putting the hard drive in and just using it as spare storage then? XD

Simplest way, though you can always change that around when you next reformat if you want..

Is there any reason you particularly want to keep the OS on the existing disc if you believe it to be slower than the new one? If I were you, i'd put anything that you want to load fast on the newer larger disc, and keep the slower one for stuff like videos and mp3s, stuff that it doesn't really matter if it loads a bit more slowly because it's streaming media that you won't really notice the difference on when you compare it against the time taken watching the content.

How comfortable are you with Linux? It's pretty trivial in Linux to do a raw byte for byte copy from one disc to another using the dd tool, and you should be able to do that from a terminal on an Ubuntu boot CD or similar (though stuff like software RAID in Windows or RAID that Linux doesn't have drivers for can really screw that up, but it sounds here like you only have 1 disc so aren't doing RAID).

Clone the old disc to the new, boot off the new one, then use the Windows inbuilt tools or more Linux tools (gparted, which has a GUI rather than needing to be used on the command line) to resize the partition to take advantage of the full disc. If you find that it hasn't worked and you can't boot off your new disc for some reason, just stick the old one back in and you're back where you were with no problems, ready to try again or whatever you want.

It's not foolproof. If you get the arguments the wrong way round on the dd command you'd end up cloning a blank disc right over all your data and erasing everything, but if you feel comfortable doing it you should be fine as long as you read the man pages (instructions) for all the commands you're using.

you could try creating a image of your 500gb hard drive (using windows 7 for this), onto an external USB disk or similar medium.
go into the backup and restore center in win 7,
then once you have an "image" of your machine, you can use the windows 7 boot/install CD to restore your "image" to your new hard drive