Changing out hard drives

[rfdjr1]

My current system, running Windows XP Pro, has two WD SATA hard drives. The C
and D drives are on a 120Gb drive and the E and F drives are on a 200Gb drive. I
see a 500Gb Western Digital SATA drive on sale for under $100 and would like to
replace the 200Gb drive with the larger one, as my E and F drives have a lot of
pictures and music on them and I'd like the extra space. I also have an external
500Gb drive. Will I be able to simply copy the E and F drives to the external
drive (I have the space) , replace the 200 with the 500Gb drive and then copy
the E and F drives back onto the 500Gb? Will programs installed originally on
the 200Gb drive run alright? Thanks.

 

[Ken Blake]

My current system, running Windows XP Pro, has two WD SATA hard drives.
The C
and D drives are on a 120Gb drive and the E and F drives are on a 200Gb
drive. I
see a 500Gb Western Digital SATA drive on sale for under $100 and would
like to
replace the 200Gb drive with the larger one, as my E and F drives have a
lot of
pictures and music on them and I'd like the extra space. I also have an
external
500Gb drive. Will I be able to simply copy the E and F drives to the
external
drive (I have the space) , replace the 200 with the 500Gb drive and then
copy
the E and F drives back onto the 500Gb? Will programs installed originally
on
the 200Gb drive run alright? Thanks.

Yes, but you can't simply do it with the copy command. You need a cloning
utility. Most new drives either come with one or you can download one from
the manufacturer's web site. Alternatively, you can buy an excellent program
like Acronis True Image.

 

[JS]

As long as you create two partitions on the new drive and the drive letters
are E and F
then yes you can copy the files to your external drive and copy them back to
the new drive.
The applications should work as they did before.

If you only have one partition on the external drive,
then create two folders named as follows:
1) edrive
2) fdrive

Then copy your internal drive's E partition folders and files to the
external drive's 'edrive' folder and the F partition folders and files to
the external drive's 'fdrive' folder. This should keep things properly
separated until you are ready to copy them back to the new and larger drive.

JS